


'-;.•;•:.••••-•:•;■ 




H 



■HtagSL 

• : -': : '- - : : 

.... 

11111 
gsgssr 






.-.•" : . "■•*■••.-' " 
:-x >:■■••■ • 

• • • • 

■■>■■ ■-•-■■• • 
DGcgSE«fl 



:". : 



$S38 






8 * 

■'":•"■■■■■. 
■ ■■...-.'■.•• 

■.'•••, 

■--.■••-.*■ 

HWK 




11111 
Hi ■ 



MM 

■■■■••■ 



'«:■"'■'"' 





Class 14 

Book 

Copyright N?._ 






COPYRIGHT DEPOSIT. 



WHAT IS A CHRISTIAN? 



THE MACMILLAN COMPANY 

NEW YORK • BOSTON • CHICAGO • DALLAS 
ATLANTA • SAN FRANCISCO 

MACMILLAN & CO., Limited 

LONDON • BOMBAY • CALCUTTA 
MELBOURNE 

THE MACMILLAN CO. OF CANADA, Ltd. 

TORONTO 



WHAT IS A CHRISTIAN? 



A Book for the Times 



BY 
JOHN WALKER POWELL 

If 

AUTHOR OF " THE POETS' VISION OF MAN " 

11 THE SILENCES OF THE MASTER" 

14 HIM THAT OVERCOMETH n 



Nefo gorft 

THE MACMILLAN COMPANY 

1915 

All rights reserved 



r 






Zj \ 



Copyright, 1915, 
By THE MACMILLAN COMPANY. 



Set up and electrotyped. Published October, 19 15. 



Norhjooti $msb 

J. S. Cushing Co. — Berwick & Smith Co. 

Norwood. Mass., U.S.A. 

£T 281915 
C1.A416115 



It*. I 






THE MEMORY OF 

MY FATHER 

A FRONTIER METHODIST PREACHER 
OF THE OLD SCHOOL 

AND OF 

MY MOTHER 

A SIMPLE CHRISTIAN 



INTRODUCTION 

The war in Europe has caused great search- 
ings of heart among thoughtful people the 
world over, who are asking if this is all we 
have to show for nineteen centuries of Chris- 
tian teaching. Browning's lines come to 
mind, of the Christ 

"Whose sad face on the cross sees only this, 
After the passion of a thousand years." 

President Eliot declares the Christian ethics 
a failure. John Galsworthy announces the 
death of mystical Christianity. A writer in 
the Century discusses the collapse of the 
church. The man in the street is asking, 
"Is the Christian ideal indeed practicable, 
or must the world go back in the end to the 
ancient doctrine that Might makes Right ?" 

The magazines in particular have been 
filled with discussions of this sort. It is true 
that as the first shock of the great catastrophe 



viii INTRODUCTION 

has passed away and men have begun little 
by little to find themselves and to think more 
or less clearly, the problem is seen to be less 
acute than was at first supposed. 

The great war is seen to be no isolated phe- 
nomenon, but merely the culmination of a 
long period of incubation. 

The brutality of militarism appears on 
second thought to be not much worse than 
the brutality of industrialism. 

Nevertheless the twentieth century has 
been rudely startled out of its complacency, 
and the world has been driven to look to the 
foundations of its thinking ; to ask the mean- 
ing of its ultimate ideals, its fundamental 
principles. 

While the discussion concerning the break- 
down of Christianity was at its height, one 
of the popular magazines in a moment of 
unusual insight propounded the far-reaching 
query, "What is a Christian?" How far 
may one lag behind his Master in thought 
and practice without forfeiting his right to 
the title ? 



INTRODUCTION ix 

It is true the magazine in question light- 
heartedly desired an answer in five hundred 
words. Nevertheless the question struck at 
the root of the matter, and gave rise to some 
real thinking. 

The answers received by the magazine 
revealed a surprising degree of popular spirit- 
ual insight. Coming from laymen rather 
than ministers, from men more than women, 
from the plain people, not the professional 
classes, and being fairly distributed over the 
whole country, they constitute perhaps the 
most comprehensive plebiscite on religious 
questions ever taken in America. 

In the main these letters show that the 
common religious thought has progressed 
greatly in thirty years. 

There was little mention of orthodoxy, little 
emphasis on details of doctrine, little con- 
fusion of thought over problems of scholar- 
ship. Neither the doctrine of Evolution nor 
the dust which filled the air a few years ago 
from the critical disintegration of the Scrip- 
tures seemed to worry the writers in the least. 



x INTRODUCTION 

This was not the complacent dogmatism 
which ignores the problem, but the steadfast 
conviction that the results of critical scholar- 
ship have not affected the main question. 
Evidently the world has moved since Robert 
Elsmere and The Reign of Law. 

Christianity was defined in terms of the 
spirit rather than the letter, — even as re- 
gards the teachings of Jesus himself. 

Moreover the distinction between a religion 
and a system of ethics was not lost sight of. 
The heart of the whole matter was found in 
personal loyalty to Jesus Christ, and the desire 
to embody his Spirit in the common life. 

None the less, in spite of the high degree 
of insight displayed by these popular letters, 
the confusion of tongues which arose with 
the outbreak of the war, and no less the 
vagueness of outline more or less character- 
istic of the letters themselves, suggest the 
desirability of undertaking a more definite 
and comprehensive answer to the fundamental 
question — though it may require much more 
than five hundred words. 



INTRODUCTION xi 

The papers which follow represent a series 
of discussions before a congregation of average 
folk, who seemed to find them enlightening. 

It is needless to say that they do not pre- 
tend to be exhaustive. They do undertake, 
however, to be comprehensive. 

They are the outgrowth of a fairly wide 
acquaintance with theological scholarship. 
There are many works of popular theology 
which deal with single phases of the theme, 
but the author knows of no other single book 
which attempts to survey the whole field for 
the general reader. 

The aim has been to keep the matter within 
the range of the utmost brevity compatible 
with any degree of clearness, and to present 
the so-called modern standpoint in untechni- 
cal language with a view to helping the man 
in the street to clear up his thinking. 

Any reader who cares to follow up the 
various phases of the subject in works of 
popular religious teaching is referred to the 
bibliography which is appended to this intro- 
duction. Not all the writers therein referred 



xii INTRODUCTION 

to agree in all points with each other, nor 
with the viewpoint set forth in these pages. 
The author ventures to believe, however, 
that in the main the conclusions he has advo- 
cated will be generally recognized as essential 
Christianity. 

If some would add thereto, few, he believes, 
would subtract from his conclusions, nor 
would any deny the name Christian to one 
who should embody in a fair and growing 
degree the spirit and ideals for which he 
contends. 

It would not be difficult to answer the main 
question in a single sentence. 

Jesus himself virtually defined a Chris- 
tian as one who loves God with all his heart 
and his neighbor as himself. 

John Wesley wrote a tract on "The 
Character of a Methodist/ 5 in which he 
adopted this definition, simply expanding it 
in terms of eighteenth century thought. 

An aged and saintly minister of the Bap- 
tist church was once asked, "What is a Bap- 



INTRODUCTION xiii 

tist?" He replied, "A Baptist is one who 
believes that no form of worship, nor book, 
nor creed, nor priest, can come between any 
man and his Lord. 55 

Such definitions are infinitely suggestive. 
Our difficulties begin when we ask what 
they mean. 

If the Christian ideal could be clearly de- 
fined or perfectly realized, it would cease to 
interest us, for the simple reason that it would 
no longer be an ideal. 

It is the greatness of Christianity that no 
age has been able to exhaust it; that each 
succeeding generation has found new light 
to break forth from it, has grown by it, and 
has found it in turn to grow in significance 
and power. 

It is by this that it has challenged the 
ages, and has given men reason to regard it 
as the supreme and ultimate revelation of God. 

Every age has had its own answer to the 
question, What is a Christian? The spirit- 
ual ideal of the twentieth century is quite 



xiv INTRODUCTION 

other than that of the seventeenth, which in 
turn differed from the viewpoint of the 
twelfth as that from the faith of the first 
century. 

In the beginning it was enough that a 
man should follow Jesus. 

After his death, two questions were asked 
by the apostles of those who would unite in 
their fellowship : Do you believe that Jesus of 
Nazareth was the promised Messiah of whom 
the prophets spake? and, Do you believe 
that God raised him from the dead? 

There were many other things which were 
believed and taught by the apostolic church. 
To charge, with some recent writers, that 
Peter and Paul corrupted the simplicity of 
the primitive ideal by concessions to the 
demands of the world, by reason of their 
ambitious desire to transform the growing 
church into a world-power, is to beg the whole 
question of the essential character of the 
Christian teaching. 

Nevertheless, it is evident that the theo- 
logical interpretation of the Christian message 



INTRODUCTION xv 

was second in order of time if not of im- 
portance. 

The fundamental question concerned the 
Messiahship of Jesus as witnessed by his 
resurrection: "If thou shalt confess with 
thy mouth Jesus as Lord (i.e., Messiah or 
Christ), and shalt believe in thine heart that 
God hath raised him from the dead, thou 
shalt be saved." 

It was regarded as desirable, — in some sense 
essential, — that the believer should receive 
the gift of the Holy Spirit ; but those disciples 
of Apollos whom Paul found at Ephesus were 
accepted though they had "not so much as 
heard whether the Holy Spirit were given." 

Social workers have often pointed to the 
community of goods practiced by the infant 
church at Jerusalem as an essential part of 
New Testament Christianity; but there is 
not a shred of evidence that such commu- 
nism was observed anywhere outside of Jeru- 
salem, whether at Rome, or Ephesus, or 
Corinth, or Antioch, or any other of the 
apostolic churches. 



xvi INTRODUCTION 

It was simply such communism as was 
practiced during the early months of the War 
in Brussels or Antwerp, where the common 
distress induced those who had means to 
share with their less fortunate brethren. 
Blockaded communities on the Dakota 
prairies in frontier days often resorted to 
the same method of meeting the situation. 

When Ananias kept back part of the money 
which he and his wife received for the sale of 
their land, Peter rebuked him not for keeping 
the money, which the apostle declared was 
their own to do with as they saw fit, but for 
lying to the Holy Spirit. 

Three hundred years later new conditions 
confronted the growing church, and new 
definitions of discipleship became necessary. 

Various attempts had been made to inter- 
pret the faith in terms of the prevailing 
philosophy. Two questions in particular, 
both of them utterly foreign to both the lan- 
guage and the spirit of the New Testament, 
exercised men's minds. 

The first was whether Christ's essential 



INTRODUCTION xvii 

nature was of the same or only of similar 
substance to that of God — whether one 
should say homo-ousion or homoi-ousion. The 
other was whether the Holy Spirit proceeded 
from the Father alone, or from both the 
Father and the Son. 

Both questions, it is manifest, were con- 
cerned with the central dignity and worth 
of the person of Christ. The present gen- 
eration is concerned with the same issue, 
though the form of the discussion is greatly 
changed. 

So great was the popular interest in these 
questions that we are told one could not ask 
for a fish at the market, or desire the atten- 
tions of the barber at the bath, without being 
met with a volley of theological reasoning. 

Finally the church, in council at Nicea in 
325, voted in effect that a Christian was one 
who accepted the statement of faith cham- 
pioned by Athanasius, namely, that the Son 
was of the same substance, homo-ousion, with 
the Father, and that the Holy Spirit pro- 
ceeded from both the Father and the Son. 



xviii INTRODUCTION 

We have nothing to do at this point with 
the validity of these distinctions. It suffices 
merely to point out that the determining 
mark of a Christian in the fourth century 
differed widely from that of the apostolic 
age. 

During the Middle Ages a Christian was 
one who was obedient to the church. 

This involved the acceptance of the stand- 
ards of belief, but the essential thing was 
obedience. King John of England was ex- 
communicated, not for his crimes, nor be- 
cause he was a heretic, but because he refused 
to abide by the judgment of the Pope. 

With the coming of the Reformation the 
matter became yet more confused. The Ro- 
man Church still declined to recognize as 
Christian any who refused to obey her will. 
In the Protestant churches orthodoxy be- 
came once more the test, but there was much 
dispute as to the essentials of the orthodox 
faith. 

This controversy still echoes in ecclesias- 
tical circles, as witness the exclusion of Ed- 



INTRODUCTION xix 

ward Everett Hale from the Federal Council 
of the Churches of Christ in America a few 
years ago. 

Of course, in no age was the matter as 
simple as this brief outline of ecclesiastical 
history would indicate. Every age has had 
its standards of belief, its forms of ecclesias- 
tical discipline, as well as its notions of 
Christian morals. 

Two tendencies are noteworthy, however, 
particularly in the mediaeval period. 

The first is a growing danger that the 
demands of the moral life be obscured by em- 
phasis on orthodoxy and conformity. Brown- 
ing's bishop of St. Praxed's is fairly typical 
of the mediaeval ecclesiastic. 

A good example of the religious standards 
of the time is found in Benvenuto Cellini, as 
arrant an old reprobate as ever flourished 
in the world, a boastful swashbuckler who 
thought little of killing a man before break- 
fast, and whose moral standards in general 
were, to say the least, somewhat informal. 

He records that after his unjust imprison- 



xx INTRODUCTION 

ment by Pope Paul (another of the signs of 
the times), during which period he enjoyed the 
utmost spiritual consolation from his devo- 
tions, his sanctity was evidenced by an 
actual halo which surrounded his head, and 
which was plainly seen by his friends — after 
he had called their attention to it — though 
it was more clearly visible in the twilight, 
and flourished better in the moist atmosphere 
of Italy than in the drier climate of France ! 

The second tendency is that of a double 
moral standard, one for the ordinary man 
and another for the saint. 

The Catholic Church has long distin- 
guished between "precepts" and "counsels 
of perfection." The former are commands 
of Jesus which are absolute and binding upon 
every one. The latter are special virtues sug- 
gested by the New Testament, the practice 
of which is not obligatory, but which may be 
chosen by any one who desires to follow the 
higher path and to acquire special merit. 
Such are the practice of celibacy, or the 
monastic withdrawal from the world. 



INTRODUCTION xxi 

The Protestant churches reject this dis- 
tinction, but the spirit of it persists to this 
day in the feeling that the ordinary citizen 
is not bound by as lofty a moral standard as 
the church member, who in turn is entitled 
to a certain measure of indulgence unbecom- 
ing in the minister. 

Underneath these tendencies, however, and 
beneath the particular emphasis on special 
phases of the Christian teaching peculiar to 
each age, the world has never failed to recog- 
nize a way of thinking about life, a spirit and 
a moral ideal, which are essentially Christian. 
The question, What is a Christian? is con- 
cerned with the understanding of these deeper 
essentials. 

What is the common denominator of the 
Christian centuries, of theological parties 
and religious sects ? 

What is there which in every age has under- 
lain its particular type of religious teaching, 
and which has broadened and deepened in its 
influence upon mankind until it has over- 
shadowed all other forms of religious specula- 



xxii INTRODUCTION 

tion, and to-day challenges humanity with 
its claim to universal supremacy? 

If the Christian ideal must be set aside, if 
the Christian thought is too restricted to 
interpret reality as the modern world per- 
ceives it, just what precisely is the ideal, what 
is the philosophy which must be given up ? 

The question presents several distinct 
phases, none of which must be overlooked if 
our answer is to be completely satisfying. 

There is a Christian way of thinking about 
things, of interpreting the world in which we 
live. 

There is a Christian type of moral life, a 
Christian ethical ideal. 

There is a Christian spirit ; a form of emo- 
tional experience based on the acceptance of 
the Christian philosophy and the attempt to 
carry it out in practice. 

There is a Christian type of society, a 
Christian program for the working out of 
human relations. 

There is a Christian hope for the destiny 
of the individual and of the race. 



INTRODUCTION xxiii 

Finally, there is a Christian organism in 
which the whole movement finds embodiment 
and expression. 

To regard any single one of these elements 
as the whole of Christianity is to miss the 
significance of them all, for they bear a close 
relation with each other. 

We may consent to regard certain of them 
as of more fundamental importance than the 
rest; we may regard as Christian any man 
who measurably conforms to any of them. 
But we have not answered the question with 
which we began in a way which can ulti- 
mately satisfy any one unless we take all of 
them into account. 

All these phases of the Christian teaching 
and life have their root, not in pure specula- 
tion, not merely in certain forms of logical 
reasoning, but also in the history of more 
than nineteen centuries. Our judgment of 
them must rest, therefore, not alone on the 
logic of rigor and vigor, but on the logic 
of experience as well. Certain events and 
characters of which history is the judge 



xxiv INTRODUCTION 

must enter into our understanding of the 
whole. 

From this discussion it is evident what 
must be the standpoint from which our under- 
standing of the whole matter begins, as well 
as the natural divisions into which the sub- 
ject must fall. 

That the outcome will not be final and con- 
clusive goes without saying. Life is fragmen- 
tary, tentative, developing, in this as in 
every age. No man can see it as a whole. 
No man can exhaust the significance of its 
factors, no man can see the end from the 
beginning. 

One can only declare the truth that is in 
him, in the hope that his vision may help his 
brother on the road to Enlightenment, and 
in the faith that in the fulness of time every 
lover of the truth shall have a part in that 

"Far-off divine event 
To which the whole creation moves." 

John Walker Powell. 
Minneapolis, 

August, Nineteen Fifteen. 



BIBLIOGRAPHY 

A few of the more or less popular discussions of 
religious problems are listed here. 

The Philosophical Background 

Creative Evolution, Henri Bergson. 
Personalism, Borden P. Bowne. 

The Problem of Human Life; The Truth of Religion, 
Rudolph Eucken. 

Pragmatism; The Meaning of Truth, William James. 
What Can I Know ? George Trumbull Ladd. 

Works on General Theology 

Outlines of Theology, William N. Clarke. 
System of Christian Doctrine, Henry C. Sheldon. 

The Modern Viewpoint 

Culture and Restraint, Hugh Black. 

Studies in Christianity, Borden P. Bowne. 

The New Theology, R. J. Campbell. 

Orthodoxy, G. K. Chesterton. 

Can We Still Be Christians ? Rudolph Eucken. 

The Finality of the Christian Religion, Geo. B. Foster. 

What is Christianity ? Adolph Harnack. 



xxvi BIBLIOGRAPHY 

Things Fundamental, Charles E. Jefferson. 
Reconstruction in Theology, Henry Churchill King. 
What Ought I to Believe ? George Trumbull Ladd. 
Religious Certainty, Francis J. McConnell. 
Religions of Authority, A. Sabatier. 
The Gospel for an Age of Doubt, Henry van Dyke. 

The Bible 

Sixty Years with the Bible, Wm. N. Clarke. 
Verbum Dei, Robert F. Horton. 
Beacon Lights of Prophecy, A. C. Knudson. 
The Problem of the Old Testament, James Orr. 
Modern Criticism and the Preaching of the Old Testa- 
ment, George Adam Smith. 

Teaching of Jesus 

The Kingdom of God, A. B. Bruce. 

The Ideal of Jesus, Wm. N. Clarke. 

Jesus and the Gospel, James Denny. 

The Teaching of Jesus, Robert F. Horton. 

The Ethics of Jesus, Henry Churchill King. 

The Message of Jesus (Outline Studies), Shailer 
Mathews. 

The Ethic of Jesus, James Stalker. 

The Mind of the Master, John Watson (Ian Mac- 
Laren). 

Social Problems 

The New Crusade, Charles E. Jefferson. 

Crowds, Gerald Stanley Lee. 

The Church and the Changing Order, Shailer Mathews. 



BIBLIOGRAPHY xxvii 

Jesus Christ and the Social Question; Approach to 
the Social Question, Francis G. Peabody. 

Christianity and the Social Crisis; Christianizing the 
Social Order, Walter Rauschenbusch. 

Sin and Society, Edward A. Ross. 

My Religion, Leo Tolstoi. 

The Call of the Carpenter; The Carpenter and the 
Rich Man, Bouck White. 



CONTENTS 

CHAPTER PAGE 

I. The Faith of a Christian .... 1 

II. The Ethics of Jesus 22 

III. The Christian and War 54 

IV. The Christian and Wealth .... 88 
V. The Christian Ideal 114 

VI. The Christian Hope 140 

VII. The Christian Church 166 



xxix 



WHAT IS A CHRISTIAN 



THE FAITH OF A CHRISTIAN 

The present generation is impatient of theo- 
logical distinctions. It would like to abolish 
all the creeds and unite the churches in one 
great religious trust. 

There is a good deal of common sense in 
this reaction against the theological hair- 
splitting of former times. We refuse to be- 
lieve that a man's opinions on the minute 
details of history or metaphysics are sufficient 
either to admit or to exclude him from the 
kingdom of grace and glory. 

Fifty years ago the orthodox Christian 
was quite convinced that no Unitarian could 
be saved. There are not wanting many to- 
day who have some doubt regarding the 
Christian Scientist. 



2 WHAT IS A CHRISTIAN 

A sounder instinct gleams through the 
reply of Father Taylor, the Boston patriarch 
and friend of Emerson, to some of his Metho- 
dist brethren who inquired if he thought the 
gentle Concord philosopher had been saved. 
"All I know/ 5 was the tart response, "is 
that if he has gone to Hell, he'll change the 
climate/ ' 

John Wesley anticipated the modern point 
of view when he declared: "I am sick of 
opinions. I am weary to bear them; my 
soul loathes the frothy food. Give me solid, 
substantial religion; give me a humble, 
gentle lover of God and man, a man full of 
mercy and good fruits, a man laying himself 
out in the work of faith, the patience of hope, 
the labor of love. Let my soul be with those 
Christians wheresoever they be and whatso- 
ever opinions they are of." 

He published the life of a Unitarian minister 
for the edification of the Methodist folk, and 
when taken to task therefor replied, "I have 
nothing to do with this man's opinions, but 
I dare not say he is not a Christian." 



THE FAITH OF A CHRISTIAN 3 

But while we acknowledge the justice of 
this, we all realize that there is a Christian 
way of thinking about things, as well as one 
that is not Christian. Robert Ingersoll may 
have been an excellent man, but his was not 
a Christian philosophy. Herbert Spencer was 
a man of the finest character, whose life bore 
many traits of the Christian ideal, but his 
thinking was diametrically opposed to that 
of Christianity, as he and every one else well 
understood. 

We are also coming to see that philosophy 
bears fruit in life; that in the long run a 
man's moral ideals will be determined by his 
answer to the fundamental questions re- 
garding the nature of existence. 

Details of doctrine, such as the questions 
raised in the fourth century about the pro- 
cession of the Holy Spirit or in the sixteenth 
about the nature of the Eucharist, may not 
have an immediate bearing upon conduct; 
but the deeper and more far-reaching ques- 
tions regarding the existence and character 
of God and His relation to humanity are 



4 WHAT IS A CHRISTIAN 

bound sooner or later to determine the moral 
ideal. The pragmatists have taught us that 
any idea which has proven fruitful in actual 
life must be regarded as essentially true; 
but the converse of this proposition is equally 
valid, namely, that a true idea will work 
good to humanity and a false one will work 
harm. 

It is of the highest importance, therefore, 
that we shall know what is the essential 
Christian philosophy. What is Christian- 
ity's answer to the deepest questions of the 
human spirit concerning the nature of reality, 
the ground of human existence, the end and 
purpose of life? 

Volumes have been written on this ques- 
tion, and it is difficult to sum the matter up 
within the limits of a single chapter in any 
way that shall be entirely satisfactory. 

There are four elements, however, which 
may be regarded in some sort as constituting 
the essence of the Christian philosophy. 
They are the Fatherhood of God, the Brother- 
hood of Man, the Mastership of Jesus Christ, 



THE FAITH OF A CHRISTIAN 5 

and the Immortal Destiny of the Human 
Soul. Let us see briefly what these mean. 



Christianity grounds its life on the convic- 
tion that the Universe is neither an accident 
nor the product of a blind Necessity, the 
mere interaction of matter and motion, of 
law and force. On the contrary it regards 
all Reality as the continual activity of One 
who knows what He is doing and where He 
is going. 

This is what Christianity means by a 
personal God. It believes that all existence 
has its root in a conscious and intelligent 
Purpose, and that this purpose is good. 

I am not attempting now to defend this 
conviction, but merely to define it, being 
fully persuaded that when it is rightly under- 
stood it commends itself to intelligence, and 
stands in its own right, without need of 
further witness. It is simply the faith that 
life is not meaningless ; that the intelligibility 
of Nature which makes science possible is a 



6 WHAT IS A CHRISTIAN 

sufficient ground for confidence in the ra- 
tionality of the whole process. 

Christianity has nothing to do with ques- 
tions of order and method in creation; but 
it stands ready to defend to the uttermost 
its conviction that life is real and earnest and 
worth while, and that it is grounded in no 
blind and barren mechanism but in an eternal 
and patient purpose for good not unlike that 
of a wise father for his children. 

This of course implies the spiritual sonship 
of humanity. It suggests that man is capable 
of understanding in some degree the reason 
and purpose of his existence; that there is 
in him a capacity for some measure of spir- 
itual communion with the Being Who created 
him and to Whom he is morally responsible 
for the use he makes of the gift and opportu- 
nity of life. 

No doubt when one undertakes to think 
these simple propositions through they in- 
volve a considerable amount of philosophical 
and theological reasoning. They raise many 



THE FAITH OF A CHRISTIAN 7 

perplexing questions. It is possible we shall 
never fully understand them or exhaust their 
significance. 

But in the terms in which we have stated 
them they are broad and simple and funda- 
mental. A Christian is a man who grounds 
his life upon these propositions ; and no man 
who denies them can be completely and 
fruitfully a Christian, no matter how nearly 
he approximates the Christian ideal in his 
personal life. 

This is not saying that a man will lose his 
soul for denying these principles ; but there 
can be no doubt that in the long run the 
Christian ideal stands or falls with them; 
and the nineteenth-century philosophy which 
began by questioning them has issued in 
the twentieth-century doctrine — exemplified 
these last days — that might makes right, 
and that the Christian doctrine of brother- 
hood and mutual service must be cast as 
rubbish to the void. 



8 WHAT IS A CHRISTIAN 

II 

Christianity likewise pins its faith to the 
dignity and worth of humanity, and lays 
the foundation for its ethical teaching in the 
doctrine of universal brotherhood. It in- 
sists on a measure of moral freedom in human 
nature. It refuses to interpret humanity by 
its brute origin; it measures man rather by 
his spiritual kinship with his Creator. 

There is nothing especially distinctive in 
this, as compared with other forms of reli- 
gious faith. The stoic philosophy in partic- 
ular was akin to the Christian ethics in the 
lofty dignity of its conception of human 
values. Christianity simply represents the 
completest development of the spiritual in- 
terpretation of humanity, finding the basis 
for its conception of human dignity in its 
doctrine of God. 

The point, however, to be kept in mind 
in this connection is that Christianity has 
actually superseded all other forms of religion 
in the thought life of the modern world ; and 



THE FAITH OF A CHRISTIAN 9 

the question is not between Christianity's 
conception of humanity and that set forth 
by other faiths, but between Christianity 
and the scientific doctrine which regards 
mankind as nothing more than a by-product 
of evolution, being in reality nothing but an 
exceedingly intricate automaton, whose con- 
scious processes are nothing more than chemi- 
cal reactions — in Spencer's phrase, "motor 
excitations in the ganglia." 

Christianity refuses to be bound by this 
doctrine of mechanism. 

It insists that such a theory of existence 
leaves out all the most important elements of 
the problem and simply abandons all attempt 
to interpret reality. 

Claiming the right to believe that the Uni- 
verse itself is personal rather than mechanical 
in its deepest ground, Christianity looks upon 
the human personality as akin to the divine, 
and hence vested with all the dignity and 
infinite value of sonship to God. 

Finding this worth in man as man, it re- 
fuses to be bound by caste and class distinc- 



10 WHAT IS A CHRISTIAN 

tions; to regard any race, however back- 
ward or degraded, as alien or outcast. 

It declares that the strong and the weak, 
the civilized and the barbarian, the cultured 
and the ignorant, are bound together by ties 
which cannot be broken and which it is per- 
ilous to ignore. 

Thus it finds in the essential character of 
mankind the ground for its personal ethics 
and no less for its social theory. It bids 
the strong bear the burdens of the weak, 
and to use the advantages given them by 
their larger opportunities in the interest of 
the common good, that the whole level of 
humanity may be lifted and the path of 
spiritual attainment be opened to the weak- 
est and most ignorant. 

No way of looking at humanity less com- 
prehensive than this or with a less resolute 
faith in the essential worth and dignity of 
human nature and the possibilities hidden 
beneath the most unpromising exterior can 
be regarded as Christian. 



THE FAITH OF A CHRISTIAN 11 

III 

Christianity is more, however, than a 
system of metaphysics or of ethics. 

It is an historical system of faith, of wor- 
ship, and of practice, which traces its origin 
to the life and teachings of a single man whose 
character it regards as the embodiment of its 
loftiest ideals, and to whose personality it 
pays the utmost reverence, both offering to 
him and demanding in his name the highest 
allegiance. 

No type of thought and life which ignores 
this history can consistently be called Chris- 
tian. We may not settle in advance the 
problems of historical research, nor insist 
that spiritual truth can be absolutely bound 
up with any happening in time or space ; but 
we have a right to insist that the history of 
Christianity shall receive adequate explana- 
tion. 

Sober thought refuses to believe that a 
great and creative personality can be the 
product of imagination. 



12 WHAT IS A CHRISTIAN 

The greatest characters of fiction and 
mythology are when all is said the product 
of manufacture, of the synthesis of traits 
and characteristics found in the experience 
of humanity itself. Such products of the 
imagination always bear the mark of the 
tool. They share the weakness and limita- 
tion of their creators. No one imagines that 
Jupiter or Hercules, that Don Quixote or 
Jean Valjean, ever existed. We know plainly 
that the former were the product of the 
collective imagination of the Greeks, as the 
latter of the creative genius of their authors. 

It is far otherwise with the characters of 
Confucius or Gautama or Socrates. Little 
as we know of the actual history of these 
men, whose images have come down to us 
colored by the imagination of their disciples, 
no serious student of history has the slightest 
doubt not only that they existed, but that 
they made upon the mind and heart of their 
time essentially the impression that is handed 
down to us. 

If the character of Jesus Christ transcends 



THE FAITH OF A CHRISTIAN IS 

them all, so that by common consent it is 
impossible to sum him up under the cat- 
egories of ordinary humanity, it is the more 
unbelievable that he was the product of the 
crude imaginations and narrow prejudices 
of a group of Jewish peasants and rabbis. 
Christianity does not stand or fall with any 
particular attempt to understand or inter- 
pret the person of Christ; nevertheless in a 
real and abiding sense Christianity is Christ. 

The only God it knows is the Father of our 
Lord Jesus Christ. That is to say, it believes 
in God as Jesus revealed Him by precept and 
example, and can think of God in no other 
terms. When it wants to know what God is 
like, it turns to Jesus Christ for the answer 
to this question. 

It acknowledges Jesus as the ethical Master 
of mankind. It believes that he revealed 
the possibilities of manhood; that he em- 
bodied in his own character the loftiest ideals 
in a way that cannot be transcended; that 
every succeeding generation may under- 
stand him more perfectly, may more com- 



14 WHAT IS A CHRISTIAN 

pletely incarnate his ideal in its ethical life, 
but that it cannot outgrow him or leave him 
behind. 

There is one element in the Christian in- 
terpretation of Jesus which is largely over- 
looked in the religious thinking of the pres- 
ent day, but which has nevertheless played 
an extremely important part in the history of 
the Christian faith. That is the conception 
of Jesus as in some sense the Redeemer and 
Savior of mankind. 

Christian thought has from the beginning 
looked on Jesus as something more than a 
spiritual teacher, or even as the incarnation 
of the moral and spiritual ideal. It has 
found in him the supreme spiritual dynamic. 

His death has been regarded as the central 
moral tragedy of history, in some strange 
fashion involving the character of God Him- 
self in a hand-to-hand conflict with the powers 
of evil; so that it holds a unique relation to 
the spiritual history of the race, and is a 
fountain of healing power wherein the 



THE FAITH OF A CHRISTIAN 15 

ceaseless tragedy of human experience shall 
find its solution and the moral weakness of 
mankind be strengthened for ultimate vic- 
tory. 

Once more we are not concerned to defend 
this doctrine, or even to define it in detail, 
but only to point out its central place in 
historic Christianity. If it is ever to be set 
aside as of no essential importance, the burden 
of proof is upon those who would reject it. 
It may have been subject to many grossly 
crude and imperfect interpretations, but that 
it has hitherto held the central place in the 
Christian philosophy of the spiritual life there 
can be no doubt. 

In the Christian way of thinking about 
things Jesus Christ is more than an ideal. 
He is the unfailing fountain of spiritual 
power; and he holds that place in virtue 
of the totality of his human experience, 
whereby he can enter sympathetically into 
the struggles and passions of the weakest of 
his brethren and can enable them to be more 
than conquerors in life's battle. 



16 WHAT IS A CHRISTIAN 

It is evident that the essential thing in 
the Christian attitude toward Jesus is not 
intellectual interpretation but ethical loyalty. 
It does not ask of any man that he shall 
understand Jesus; it does insist that he shall 
obey him. 

The modern world has grown weary of 
theological discussions, and it resents the 
attitude of orthodoxy in denying the name 
Christian to any who bear the spirit of the 
Master though they may not interpret him 
under the traditional forms. The attitude 
of Jesus himself to the men and women about 
him furnishes ample precedent for the broad- 
est spirit of tolerance. But no man in the 
first century or the twentieth is entitled to be 
called a Christian who does not offer to Jesus 
Christ the most heartfelt loyalty. Richard 
Watson Gilder expressed the heart of the 
matter in his well-known lines : 

"If Jesus Christ be man, 
(And only a man), I say 
That of all mankind I will cleave to him, 
And to him I will cleave alway. 



THE FAITH OF A CHRISTIAN 17 

" If Jesus Christ be God, 

(And the only God), I swear 
I will follow him through heaven and hell, 
The earth, the sea, and the air." 

IV 

The Christian faith concerning the Father- 
hood of God, the Brotherhood of Man, and 
the Mastership of Jesus Christ does not, 
however, exhaust its thought about life; for 
these things find their completion in the 
conviction that human destiny is not limited 
to the brief years of earthly existence, but 
that to every soul is granted the opportunity 
and possibility of the immortal hope. 

A man may be Christian in his spirit and pur- 
pose and be in doubt on this point, but there 
could be no Christianity without it. The 
Christian interpretation of life is one in which 

" Our noisy years seem moments in the being 
Of the eternal silence : truths that wake, 

To perish never ; 
Which neither listlessness, nor mad endeavor, 

Nor Man nor Boy, 
Nor all that is at enmity with joy 
Can utterly abolish or destroy !" 



18 WHAT IS A CHRISTIAN 

The Christian view of immortality is not 
some vague hope for the persistence of the 
race, for the treasuring up in some other form 
of existence of the net results of human ex- 
perience, somehow detached from the per- 
sistence of the human consciousness. It is 
the simple and inextinguishable belief that 
death is only an incident in individual 
experience, and that the soul which begins 
here graduates from this kindergarten and 
primary school into the larger experience 
of an exhaustless future. 

Nor can we ignore the fact that Christianity 
regards this conception of life as involving 
grave moral risk. The crude notions of 
Hell which medieval Christianity inherited 
from paganism may have been outgrown. 
Our growing experience of the healing power 
of spiritual truth, our insight that punish- 
ment is in its essence remedial rather than 
retaliatory, may enlarge our hope 

" That somehow good 
Will be the final goal of ill;" 

but that must not blind us to the note of 



THE FAITH OF A CHRISTIAN 19 

solemn warning which has formed so essen- 
tial a part of the message of every great 
spiritual teacher, and was so gravely and 
sternly enunciated by Jesus Christ. 

Life from the Christian viewpoint is a 
matter of infinite possibilities, and for that 
very reason a thing not to be trifled with or 
lived idly or carelessly. The brighter the 
radiance of its spiritual light, the darker by 
contrast the shadow cast by moral failure 
and wrong. 

The essential meaning of the whole system 
of Christian thought, from its belief in God 
and its loyalty to Jesus Christ to its fairest 
pictures of the immortal hope, is that life 
has a great and inexhaustible meaning, by 
reason of which it is also an achievement and 
task which is set before every human soul. 
To him that overcometh shall be given a 
crown of life, but those who through wil- 
fulness rebel against the high demands of 
the spirit, or through cowardice make the 
great refusal, can have no part in the glory 
of such a destiny. 



20 WHAT IS A CHRISTIAN 

The largest hope that the yearning sym- 
pathy of the greatest souls has been able to 
write over the shadow of such loss is that 
those who have made shipwreck of life may 
pass into 

' 'That sad, obscure, sequestered state 
Where God unmakes but to remake the soul 
He else made first in vain, which must not be." 

This then is the Christian philosophy. 

Men may differ in their understanding of 
any of the elements of this thought, but no 
philosophy of life which leaves out any of 
these things can be termed in any adequate 
sense a Christian philosophy. A man may 
follow the Christian ideal or manifest the 
Christian spirit without accepting this phi- 
losophy, but such moral and spiritual grace is 
none the less the fruit of the Christian teach- 
ing, the twilight glimmer of light after the 
sun has set. In the long run there can be no 
day without the sunshine. 

The Christian ideal cannot long survive 
the decay of the Christian philosophy. If 
this way of thinking about things be sound, 



THE FAITH OF A CHRISTIAN 21 

we may more adequately understand it as 
the ages go by, but we cannot exhaust or 
transcend it. 

If Christianity is in any sense the ultimate 
religious faith, it is this Christianity which 
we have however imperfectly outlined. This 
is what all the theologies have tried to say. 
These are the essential ideas which underlie 
the teaching of all the churches and which 
have been embodied in the Christian thought 
of all the ages since the days of the apostles, 
however the form and emphasis may have 
varied from generation to generation; and 
this is the first part of our answer to the ques- 
tion, What is a Christian? 



II 

THE ETHICS OF JESUS 

We tried in our first discussion to show that 
Christianity has by no means meant the 
same thing at every stage of its history; 
and moreover that it is made up of several 
elements and involves several distinct points 
of view, all of which are essential to a complete 
understanding of what is meant by it. 

The first of these elements was found to 
be the Christian philosophy of life; and we 
undertook to sum up briefly those things 
which a Christian ought to know and believe 
to his soul's health. 

We come now to the second important ele- 
ment in the complete answer to the question, 
What is a Christian ? namely, the Christian 
standard of life, its moral ideal. 

And first of all, we must undertake to 
analyze the moral teachings of the founder of 

22 



THE ETHICS OF JESUS 23 

Christianity. We are all agreed that a doc- 
trine is known by its fruits, and that no one 
ought to be called a Christian, however 
correct his intellectual notions, unless his 
life squares with the principles of his Master. 
Again we come to a subject upon which 
volumes have been written. In a general 
way we know what we mean by a Christian 
life based on the teaching and example of 
Jesus. The Golden Rule, purity of life, 
patience, gentleness, charity, unselfishness, 
— these are the things which go to make up 
the Christian ideal in the common thought 
of mankind. It is when we come to partic- 
ularize, to define the elements of these princi- 
ples or their application to the problems of 
everyday life, that our difficulties arise. 

I 

Laying aside all the critical questions 
raised by modern scholarship regarding the 
authenticity of the New Testament records 
and the degree to which we are entitled to 
feel that we have the ipsissima verba of Jesus, 



24 WHAT IS A CHRISTIAN 

or even that the teaching as we have it has 
not been colored by the minds of the New 
Testament writers; and assuming that in 
the gospels we have a fairly accurate record 
of what he said, there still remain serious 
difficulties in the way of a satisfactory under- 
standing of his teaching. 

To begin with, Jesus made many extreme 
demands: "I say unto you that ye resist 
not evil" ; "swear not at all"; "take no 
thought, saying, what shall we eat or what 
shall we drink"; "sell whatsoever thou hast 
and give to the poor," etc. On the face of 
it, these sayings of Jesus make an absolute 
demand for non-resistance, for the abjuring 
of patriotism and national loyalty, for poverty 
and even for celibacy. 

Jesus also said a great many contradictory 
things. He bade men love their enemies, 
yet he said, "If any man come to me and hate 
not his father and mother, he cannot be my 
disciple." He taught the principle of non- 
resistance, but he likewise said, "I came not 
to send peace but a sword," and told his 



THE ETHICS OF JESUS 25 

followers that if any of them lacked a sword, 
he should sell his garment and buy one. He 
himself made a whip of small cords and drove 
the traders from the Temple, while the biting 
scorn of his bitter arraignment of the Scribes 
and Pharisees is not surpassed in the whole 
literature of invective. 

The difficulty of reconciling these statements 
with each other or of squaring the demands of 
Jesus with the conditions of everyday life has 
led to several interpretative expedients. 

The most convenient way, of course, is to 
adopt such sayings as please us and ignore 
the rest. 

A good many modern interpreters, having 
first agreed with themselves that only the 
sayings which represent the passive virtues 
can be regarded as truly Christian, assert 
that when he declared these great truths 
Jesus rose to the supreme moral height, but 
that when he showed anger toward the 
Pharisees or displayed force against the 
traders in the Temple, he sinned against his 
own principles. 



26 WHAT IS A CHRISTIAN 

This is, of course, at the outset to for- 
swear that loyalty to the Mastership of 
Jesus which Christianity historically demands. 
To adopt this position is to substitute some- 
thing else for Christianity, which may be 
better and may be derived from certain ele- 
ments in the Christian tradition, but which 
surrenders the religious history of the last 
nineteen centuries as abortive and futile. 

Akin to this rejection of Jesus in the name 
of his own teachings is that other form of 
skepticism which regards the whole Christian 
program as an impractical idealism, ema- 
nating from the brain of a dreamer, and 
which a practical world will do well to ignore. 
At best it can only be classified with Plato's 
Republic and the Utopia of Sir Thomas 
More as suggestive attempts to picture ideal 
conditions, the practical value of which lies 
simply in the way in which they illustrate cer- 
tain phases of ethical philosophy. They may 
play no small part in the training of the philo- 
sophical mind, but are not to be taken seriously 
as contributions to a practical social program. 



THE ETHICS OF JESUS 27 

Still another class of interpreters regard 
the teaching of Jesus as intended only for 
those who are willing to withdraw from the 
world of everyday life and live for the ideal 
kingdom of the future. They were never 
intended for the guidance of humanity in 
general. Jesus had no thought of Chris- 
tianizing this world, of developing a Chris- 
tian civilization; but only of gathering out 
of the world a loyal remnant who were ex- 
pected to follow his precepts so far as pos- 
sible in their relation with the world about 
them, but could expect to see them completely 
fulfilled only in that divine event to which 
the whole creation moves. 

The historic attitude of the Catholic Church 
toward the teaching of Jesus is an attempt to 
compromise by distinguishing between the 
"precepts" of Jesus, which were intended 
to be obeyed by every one and to lay down 
the principles of a Christian social order in 
the world, and the "counsels of perfection," 
which could be perfectly realized only under 
the ideal conditions of another world, but 



28 WHAT IS A CHRISTIAN 

might be chosen and put in practice so far 
as the weakness of the flesh would permit by 
those who felt called to be saints. 

The ordinary citizen might make war, 
accumulate wealth, marry, and live the com- 
mon life of mankind in the world, guided 
only by the general principles of integrity and 
loyalty to the truth. The higher call and 
the life of religious devotion demanded pov- 
erty, chastity, and non-resistance, and could 
be followed only by the monk and nun. It 
involved a complete separation from the 
world and a denial of all human ties. 

There remains for consideration one other 
class of interpreters, of whom Tolstoi was the 
most conspicuous representative, who de- 
mand literal obedience to the precepts of 
Jesus in the world of common life; who in 
obedience to his command regarding the 
taking of oaths would do away with the 
state, which rests upon the oath of alle- 
giance; in obedience to the law of non-re- 
sistance would forbid the police power no 
less than war, and require a man to remain 



THE ETHICS OP JESUS 29 

passive, not only when his own life or prop- 
erty is in danger, but even when the life or 
honor of his wife or daughter is attacked ; 
in obedience to the law of poverty would 
forbid all property and establish universal 
communism; and in obedience to the law 
of love would require that the slightest whim 
of the meanest beggar shall be law to his 
prosperous neighbors. 

Regarding all of these methods of inter- 
preting Jesus, three or four things should be 
said : 

The notion that the Kingdom of God is 
an imperium in imperio, a little group of 
brands plucked from the burning, of elect 
souls who have chosen to separate themselves 
from a doomed world and to be guided by 
laws and principles utterly contradictory to 
the life of the world and completely practi- 
cable only in a future state, is an entirely 
understandable one in behalf of which much 
might be said. It was for centuries essen- 
tially the accepted understanding of Chris- 
tianity, and is held to-day in its main outlines 



30 WHAT IS A CHRISTIAN 

by the whole conservative party in the Chris- 
tian church. 

If we reject this viewpoint, it is only for 
two reasons; first, that it has itself never 
been able consistently to carry out its own 
literalism, but has weakened its spiritual 
power by a never-ending succession of com- 
promises with the world; and second, be- 
cause we believe that the essential principles 
of Jesus have a wider validity than men have 
dreamed, and that his spiritual power is in 
fact in the long run capable not merely of 
redeeming a mere handful of elect spirits 
out of a doomed race, but of redeeming 
humanity itself, of purifying and elevating 
the whole of human society and of Chris- 
tianizing civilization. Of such a dream the 
New Testament writers themselves caught 
glimpses when they wrote of a day when the 
kingdoms of this world should become the 
Kingdom of our Lord and of His Christ. 

This conviction is supported by the fact 
that some of the religious ideals cherished by 
the earlier interpreters of Christianity have 



THE ETHICS OF JESUS 31 

been definitely set aside by the verdict of 
history- 
Monastic asceticism is one of these. The 
monastic orders failed, not because their 
leaders ceased to be loyal to the principles 
with which they began, but because the 
monastic ideal was itself a false and distorted 
one which was contrary not only to the 
weakness of fallen human nature, but to the 
real demands of the loftiest spirituality. 

If Christianity means that it is better to 
starve and mistreat the body than to live a 
normal, wholesome physical life; that the 
loftiest spiritual attainments are not com- 
patible with the obligations and responsibili- 
ties of marriage and parenthood, or the loyal 
discharge of the obligations of everyday life; 
then the world has once for all discarded 
Christianity, and we had best recognize the 
fact and set about adjusting ourselves to 
the situation as it exists. 

Mankind will never go back to the ideals 
of St. Simeon Stylites, who lived for thirty 
years on the top of a pillar ; of St. Catherine, 



32 WHAT IS A CHRISTIAN 

who had herself bound to a cross for several 
hours of every day ; of St. Anthony, who 
fled to the desert to escape the contamina- 
tion of the world ; nor of any other of the 
ascetics of the medieval world, whose pic- 
turesqueness at the distance of several 
centuries is only equaled by the morbid 
unwholesomeness of their whole attitude 
toward life. 

The double moral standard involved in 
the Catholic distinction between precepts 
and counsels of perfection is likewise one 
which offends the moral judgment of man- 
kind. We all refuse to believe that there is 
one standard of life for one man and another 
for his neighbor. 

Of course, we realize that for particular 
occasions and under special circumstances a 
greater demand may be made upon some 
individuals than others. College boys in 
training for a football game are subject 
to a mode of life which is not normal and 
which if continued too long would defeat 
its own end of high physical efficiency; but 



THE ETHICS OF JESUS 33 

for a brief period the special sacrifices de- 
manded bring about proportionate results. 

So a doctor is compelled by the demands 
of his profession to make sacrifices which the 
ordinary citizen escapes ; the teacher and 
the minister must make peculiar sacrifices 
to their calling; the work of the missionary 
demands a degree of heroism and self-devotion 
to which everyday life is a stranger; the 
soldier lives under conditions which would 
utterly destroy humanity if the attempt 
should be made to apply them universally. 

But we refuse to believe that these special 
sacrifices involve any higher degree of spir- 
itual worth than the common life. The cate- 
gories of right and wrong can be applied only 
on a universal basis. A system of ethical 
teaching must be susceptible of universal 
application or it is valueless. The teaching 
of Jesus is for all mankind or none. 

Finally, there is no hope in literalism. If 
one logically and consistently attempts im- 
partially to apply the principle of literal 
interpretation to everything which Jesus said, 



34 WHAT IS A CHRISTIAN 

he lands in hopeless confusion and contradic- 
tion. 

Even Tolstoi can make headway only by 
accepting one or two of the sayings of Jesus 
which he will interpret literally and which 
he will then make the standard for the inter- 
pretation of everything else ; anything which 
seems to contradict these sayings is set aside 
or interpreted out of existence. 

II 

Is there any way out of this deadlock? 
Can we interpret the teachings of Jesus in 
any way which will reveal them as clearly and 
indisputably the supreme law of human life? 

There are two or three guiding principles 
which must be applied in any adequate study 
of the words of Christ. 

The first is the clear recognition of his 
paradoxical method. 

As Wendt pointed out, Jesus was an Orien- 
tal, with the Oriental's poetical gift, his free- 
playing imagination and love for figurative 



THE ETHICS OF JESUS 35 

speech. It was necessary to startle men out 
of their mental and spiritual sluggishness; 
to challenge their attention and to compel 
them to think. Accordingly, Jesus habit- 
ually employed modes of speech which have 
been an unending stumblingblock to our 
forthright and literal western minds. 

Thoughtful readers of the New Testament 
are coming to realize how much of metaphor 
there is in the speech of Jesus. When he 
declared men must eat his flesh and drink 
his blood, we no longer puzzle our brains with 
metaphysical mysteries as to how the bread 
and wine of the Eucharist can be transformed 
into the actual literal flesh that hung on the 
Cross, or the blood that was poured out of 
his side. We frankly recognize a daring 
metaphor. 

Even the doctrine of the New Birth is 
nowadays interpreted less by the grammar 
and the dictionary than by the broad recogni- 
tion of a general spiritual law of which birth 
is the aptest symbol. 

We do not so readily recognize the number 



36 WHAT IS A CHRISTIAN 

of statements to be found among the sayings 
of Jesus which are couched in an extreme and 
superlative form that could not possibly be 
accepted literally. An instance is his keenly 
humorous remark about the futility of trying 
to remove the grain of dust from our neigh- 
bor's eye when one has a floor joist in his own. 

So when he said, "I came not to send peace 
but a sword/' no one has ever imagined that 
he meant what he said; men have always 
understood the saying as a vivid and start- 
ling expression of the inevitable effect of a 
spiritual revelation in a world so largely 
governed by selfish and unspiritual motives. 

In like manner, when he promised his 
followers a hundred-fold return in this pres- 
ent life for all the sacrifices they had made 
for the Kingdom of Heaven, Peter and John 
were not misled into expecting to become 
possessors of vast landed estates; nor did 
even Tolstoi attempt to interpret this saying 
literally. 

Our common sense reduces the parallax in 
such sayings as instinctively as our brain 



THE ETHICS OF JESUS 37 

unifies the double visual image projected by 
our two eyes. 

So when Jesus declared that no man could 
be his disciple without hating his own mother, 
no one has ever for a moment imagined that 
Jesus meant this literally. We recognize 
it plainly for what it is, an extreme and 
startling statement of a profound spiritual 
truth. The statement in the form in which 
it was made could not by any possibility be 
true. We frankly discount it by the appli- 
cation of common sense. 

The same principle is applicable to the 
remark of Jesus that faith equivalent to a 
grain of mustard seed could transplant trees 
and remove mountains. No one imagines 
that two or three earnest and devoted Chris- 
tians by agreeing in prayer could have 
brought the Panama Canal into existence 
without physical effort. We regard the 
vision and courage which attempted so gigan- 
tic a project and put it through to a successful 
conclusion as a real fulfilment of the promise 
of Jesus. 



38 WHAT IS A CHRISTIAN 

These instances of paradoxical method are 
sufficient to excite the suspicion that possibly 
the other startlingly difficult sayings of Jesus, 
over which the conscience of Christendom 
has stumbled for two thousand years, are 
susceptible of the same interpretation. 

Some one asks in alarm, "Did not Jesus 
mean what he said?" 

We answer, Yes, by all means, but he very 
seldom said what he meant. 

He undertook to challenge the human con- 
science by a loftier ethical ideal than men had 
dreamed of. 

He knew the danger of laying down pre- 
cepts which succeeding generations under ever 
modifying conditions must find increasingly 
difficult of interpretation and application. 

He wanted to compel men to think out 
their moral principles, and to be guided by 
them because they had come to recognize 
their validity, not because they had been 
announced with authority. 

Accordingly he was forever saying things 
which could not be literally interpreted, in 



THE ETHICS OF JESUS 39 

order that men might be driven in spite of 
themselves to think out their meaning. 

The principle of non-resistance, the pro- 
hibition of oaths, and the warning against 
anxiety for temporal blessings must all be 
interpreted by this principle. 

When he bade men resist not evil, he was 
not prohibiting the punishment of wrong or 
the defense of the right, he was declaring 
the supreme worth of the virtue of forbear- 
ance. 

The prohibition of oaths had nothing to 
do with political allegiance, it meant simply 
that a man's word ought to be as good as 
his bond. 

The warning against worldliness and es- 
pecially the spirit of anxious absorption in 
material things was nothing more than a 
vivid, thought-compelling statement of the 
superior worth of the spiritual over the tem- 
poral. 

The second guiding principle for the in- 
terpretation of the teachings of Jesus is to 



40 WHAT IS A CHRISTIAN 

recognize that he was stating ultimate prin- 
ciples rather than laying down specific rules. 

Every lawyer knows the difference between 
constitutional law and statutory enactment. 
Strictly speaking, a constitution should be 
nothing but the statement of general fun- 
damental principles. The statute law is an 
attempt to apply these principles under 
specific conditions to specific cases. 

It is impossible to enact any law that is 
valid at all times and under all conditions. 
It is possible so to analyze the principles of 
justice as to arrive at a fundamental legal 
doctrine which is universally valid and which 
the judgment and practical sense of every 
generation must apply for itself. 

It is impossible to find among the sayings 
of Jesus anything that is unmistakably in- 
tended as definite command, to be always 
and everywhere obeyed. Some of his sayings 
have that appearance at first glance, but when 
we look carefully at the circumstances under 
which they were uttered and their relation 
to his other and broader sayings, we see 



THE ETHICS OF JESUS 41 

plainly that they were at most nothing more 
than illustrations of a back-lying general 
principle. 

What Jesus undertook to do was not to 
legislate for all times and all conditions of 
human society, for that in the nature of things 
is impossible ; but he sought by every means 
to establish in the hearts of his followers the 
recognition of the broad fundamental social 
and ethical principles upon which all sound 
living must rest, and which constitute the 
supreme moral ideal of humanity, — the 
flying goal toward which we may forever 
approach but which we can never exhaust 
and surpass. 

The third guiding principle is that the aim 
of Jesus was not to conform the outward 
actions of men to the letter of the moral law, 
but rather to transform them by the awaken- 
ing of a loftier and truer inward spirit. 

This is the significance of his doctrine of 
the New Birth. He declared that the only 
way to get good fruit is to make the tree good. 



42 WHAT IS A CHRISTIAN 

If one desires grapes, he must not look for 
them on a thorn tree. Other moralists have 
aimed at constructing a perfect ethical sys- 
tem; Jesus aimed at regenerating human 
lives, that the law might be forever written 
on men's hearts. 

Here once more we must be careful not to 
press his sayings to their absolute .limit. He 
did not mean that some men were essentially 
thorn trees, from whom no good fruit could 
be expected. But he recognized what every 
thoughtful person knows, that "'tis one thing 
to know and another to practice"; that 
external pressure, whether of physical force 
or of social constraint, may compel men 
outwardly to obey the correct rules of con- 
duct, but it cannot make bad men good. 
Nothing can do that but some spiritual in- 
fluence whereby their whole inner attitude 
toward life is changed. 

Accordingly Jesus was more concerned to 
set in motion spiritual forces which should 
of themselves work out in human life a 
truly moral order than he was to present 



THE ETHICS OF JESUS 43 

men with a perfect Pattern for their outward 
conduct. 

The adoption of this mode of interpreting 
the ethics of Jesus seems to leave us without 
any ultimate Moral Authority. "The Pope 
has wine, but no wife. The Sultan has many 
wives, but no wine." Which of them is 
right? Or are they both partly right and 
partly wrong ? 

As a matter of fact we have never really 
had an authority, appeal to which could settle 
this question. The very fact that Christen- 
dom itself is split in two over the question 
as to where the seat of authority lies indi- 
cates that the whole matter rests at bottom 
on our choice of authorities, which in turn is 
dictated by a thousand influences of desire 
and prejudice as well as of reason. 

So our loss is only an imaginary one. In 
the long run nothing has any real claim upon 
our ethical obedience which does not com- 
mend itself to our trained and cultivated moral 
intuition. 

Nothing is gained by paying verbal trib- 



44 WHAT IS A CHRISTIAN 

lite to the authority of a moral principle, 
and then locking it away in a glass case be- 
cause it is not practical under the limitations 
of everyday life. Even an imperfect moral 
ideal which is a living factor in our life and 
has an actual influence upon our conduct is 
worth infinitely more than the most perfect 
ideal to which we pay only verbal reverence. 
If we will take our common sense, stimu- 
lated and purified by a loyal devotion to the 
loftiest spiritual purpose, and apply it to 
understanding the teaching of Jesus, we shall 
find that these three principles which we have 
outlined will be sufficient to put us in touch 
with his purpose, to enable us to understand 
and grasp his spirit, and to comprehend the 
essential ethical principles which he sought 
to establish in human life. 

Ill 

We come now to ask what are the essential 
elements in the Ethics of Jesus? They are 
four in number : 

First, character is the chief good. 



THE ETHICS OF JESUS 45 

Not possessions, nor fame, nor honor ; not 
success nor prosperity; not physical pleas- 
ure and ease; not even happiness in the 
common understanding of the word which 
implies the satisfaction of all the ordinary 
desires of the human heart — including many 
that are entirely normal and in most cases 
legitimate : none of these can completely sat- 
isfy the human spirit nor fulfil the highest 
demands of life. 

No man has attained who has not become a 
good man, pure and loyal and true of soul; 
whose character, though bought at the cost 
of all the common aims of existence, will 
stand the test of every temptation and bring 
him into communion with the Divine. 

Second, judgment must lie upon the spirit 
of life rather than upon its outward conform- 
ity to the letter of the law. 

This is the other side of the principle sug- 
gested a moment ago, that Jesus aimed at 
producing a right spirit rather than at shap- 
ing men's outward acts. The essence of the 



46 WHAT IS A CHRISTIAN 

moral law itself lies in its spirit rather than in 
the letter. Hence men must be judged by 
the spirit which seeks expression in outward 
acts rather than by their acts themselves. 

The outward law concerns itself with the 
various degrees of the crime of murder; 
Jesus declared that the real sin lies in the 
spirit of hatred which engenders the crime. 
The law carefully guards the outward purity 
of men's lives; Jesus said, "Whoso looketh 
on the sin with desire hath committed it 
already in his heart." 

This is a principle which cuts both ways. 

Its demand is infinitely more searching 
than that of the outward law. By it a great 
many respectable citizens of irreproachable 
conduct stand condemned, because in their 
hearts they have transgressed through de- 
sires they do not deem it expedient to grat- 

ify. 

But on the other hand it relieves men of 
the intolerable burden of Pharisaic literalism. 
"'Tis not what man does that exalts him, but 
what man would do." 



THE ETHICS OF JESUS 47 

"What I aspired to be, 
And was not, comforts me : 

A brute I might have been but would not sink i 5 the 
scale." 

Men are to be judged, not by the success 
with which they have put their ideals into 
practice, but by their inward love and loyalty 
to the ideal ; as a child's often mistaken at- 
tempts to help are taken by a wise love not 
for what they accomplish but for the motive 
that prompts them. 

Thus men are forever set free from the 
bondage of the letter, to live henceforth in 
the liberty of the spirit. 

Third, love is the supreme dynamic of the 
moral life. 

Love toward God is the fountain of spir- 
itual power. 

Love toward men is the spirit which alone 
can inspire those actions which shall be es- 
sentially right. 

The love of which Jesus speaks is not the 
pleasant sentiment of friendly affection, but 
"the set purpose to serve and please." It is 



48 WHAT IS A CHRISTIAN 

the quality which St. Paul celebrates in the 
Thirteenth Chapter of First Corinthians, and 
implies such a genuine recognition of each 
other's need and such a genuine spirit of good 
will as must make wrong to one's neighbor 
impossible because unthinkable, and bind 
humanity together in a perfect civilization. 

Finally, the aim of all life is mutual service. 
No man is truly good who merely abstains 
from doing harm. The final test of all 
actions is whether they serve the well-being 
of men. 

These four principles sum up the whole of 
the teaching of Jesus. It is these that dif- 
ferentiate it from the ethics of Confucius or 
Buddha. Though susceptible of such brief 
statement, they are without limit in their 
application to human conditions and in their 
power to uplift and transform human society. 

IV 

In order that men might better understand 
the character of these general principles, we 



THE ETHICS OF JESUS 49 

find Jesus applying them to some of the 
specific problems of life as he met them from 
day to day. In the examination of these 
instances other subordinate principles emerge 
which are still general in form, but which 
serve to narrow the field of application and to 
clarify our judgment in applying the larger 
principles of the Master to the problems 
which arise in our own lives. 

The first is loyalty to truth and right at 
all cost. "Blessed are they which are perse- 
cuted for righteousness' sake." 

Martyrdom is not an end in itself, a thing 
to be sought for its own sake. 

There is no particular virtue in suffering, 
nor is the martyr to be regarded as more truly 
and greatly a saint than many another whose 
outward life has been uneventful and whose 
moral contests have not been open to the 
public gaze. 

The soldier on the battle field gives the most 
spectacular exhibition of courage and patri- 
otic loyalty, but for all that he may be no 



50 WHAT IS A CHRISTIAN 

more worthy a citizen than the wife who 
suffers alone at home, or the man of business 
who struggles arduously and patiently to 
provide the sinews of war and to keep alive 
the whole nation upon whose backing the 
success of the army depends. 

Gouverneur Morris and Benjamin Franklin 
were as true patriots and sacrificed themselves 
for their country's good as unhesitatingly 
during the troublous days of the American 
struggle for independence as any soldier 
whose bloody footprints stained the snow 
at Valley Forge. "They also serve who 
only stand and wait." 

The crux of the whole matter is the inner 
loyalty which no threat of pain or ruin can 
shake. No man is a disciple of Jesus who 
is not ready to take up the Cross in the 
Master's name. 

The second is the doctrine that enmity 
and revenge must give place to forbearance 
and love. 

The spirit of retaliation is a survival of 



THE ETHICS OF JESUS 51 

primitive brute instinct which must be up- 
rooted from the human heart. 

Even in the administration of justice we 
are beginning to see that patience and for- 
bearance may enable us to transform the 
criminal into a good citizen. 

In private life we all know, if we do not 
always practice, the principle that forgive- 
ness and the returning of good for evil heap 
coals of fire on our enemy's head, and go far 
toward making enmity impossible. 

Finally, selfish ease and indulgence must 
everywhere give place to; the spirit of mutual 
helpfulness if society is to rest upon a sure 
foundation. 

" 111 fares the land, to hastening ills a prey, 
Where wealth accumulates and men decay." 

A Scottish philosopher several hundred years 
ago hesitatingly suggested that the rulers of a 
city would commit no wrong if they should so 
legislate as to put an end to poverty within 
the city's gates. We are coming to see that 
as a matter of social stability the existence of 



52 WHAT IS A CHRISTIAN 

great wealth side by side with abject poverty 
is a serious menace; and that the few have 
no right to luxurious ease and self-indulgence 
while the many are shut out from the necessi- 
ties of a well-ordered life. 

So the science of human society is coming to 
pay tribute to the insight of Jesus, who taught 
as a matter of personal righteousness that men 
must give up their own selfish comfort and ease 
for the sake of their neighbor's need. 

This brief review of the teachings of Jesus 
is, of course, extremely cursory and super- 
ficial, but enough has been said to show the 
essential character and purpose of his ethical 
doctrine. 

To push any of the sayings of Jesus to 
their logical extreme is to weaken, not to 
strengthen, their significance for humanity. 

Surely the outline here given of his ethical 
principles does not soften his demand for 
the complete surrender of the heart of man 
to the will of God. This is no soft and easy 
doctrine which is here set forth. 



THE ETHICS OF JESUS 53 

But neither is it an impossible demand 
which must of necessity take no account of 
average humanity, and leave men floundering 
in the discouragement of acknowledged spir- 
itual impotence. 

Jesus began his ethical teaching with the 
demand for a righteousness which should ex- 
ceed the righteousness of the Scribes and 
Pharisees ; but he closed it with the promise 
that the simplest act of kindness toward the 
least of men should be regarded as an act of 
loyalty and devotion to the Eternal Judge 
Himself- 



Ill 

THE CHRISTIAN AND WAR 

In our discussion of the ethical teachings of 
Jesus we found that the two most important 
things to be borne in mind in approaching the 
sayings of the Master are, first, that he con- 
tinually employed the method of paradox 
in order to startle men into seriousness and 
compel them to think; and second, that he 
was concerned with laying down fundamental 
principles rather than with enacting specific 
rules of conduct. 

The main elements in his ethical teaching 
were found to be, first, that character is the 
chief good; second, that judgment is based 
upon the motive and spirit which underlie 
human action rather than upon conformity 
to the letter of the law; third, that service 
is the aim, and love the supreme dynamic, of 
a rightly ordered life. 

54 



THE CHRISTIAN AND WAR 55 

We come now to apply these principles to 
the first of the two chief ethical problems of 
mankind, the problem which has been forced 
violently upon the attention of humanity 
during the past few months; namely, that of 
war. 

The question before us is a threefold one. 
First, can a Christian consistently engage 
in war even in obedience to his country's de- 
mand ; second, can war be defended in any 
respect as a means of settling international 
disputes, without coming into direct conflict 
with the spirit and teaching of Jesus; and 
third, can it be abolished? 

If the principles which we have adopted 
for the interpretation of the New Testament 
be sound, the question is not to be settled by 
appealing to the specific words of Jesus, no 
matter how emphatic they may appear. 

The Quakers have long defended the doc- 
trine of non-resistance by appealing to the 
words of Christ. 

Tolstoi, as we have seen, founded his doc- 
trine upon two injunctions of Jesus: "Resist 



56 WHAT IS A CHRISTIAN 

not evil/ 5 and "Swear not at all." The first 
he declared to be absolute in its character 
and to forbid not only private revenge, but 
even the organized attempt of society to 
suppress wrong through the exercise of the 
police power. The second was interpreted to 
forbid the taking of the oath of allegiance, 
and so to put an end to government. 

This mode of interpretation runs so directly 
counter, not only to our common sense but 
even to our most carefully reasoned theories 
of society and the state, that Professor Har- 
nack is justified in saying that if Tolstoi's 
interpretation be Christianity, then Chris- 
tianity has no further concern for us. 

The instinct of self-defense, and much more 
of the defense of the weak and dependent, 
is too deep-seated to be gainsaid. The in- 
stinct for government is equally fundamen- 
tal. To assume that Jesus Christ had any 
idea of overthrowing either of these funda- 
mental characteristics of humanity is either 
to make him a visionary enthusiast whose 
maunderings have no interest for sensible 



THE CHRISTIAN AND WAR 57 

men; or else to assume that humanity as 
originally constituted is a complete failure, 
and that the Almighty has undertaken to 
destroy the work of His hands in order to 
make a new start. 

Both these alternatives are so extreme that 
they ought to be adopted only as a last resort. 
As a matter of fact, Tolstoi himself took back 
with his left hand all that he had given with 
his right, when, after strenuously insisting 
that the words of Jesus were to be literally 
understood and unshrinkingly applied to 
human problems, he confessed that this was 
an impossible ideal, and declared that it was 
set forth by Jesus on the principle that one 
must aim very much higher than the mark 
he really intends to hit, as a man who desires 
to cross a violent current to a point directly 
opposite must appear to be rowing toward a 
point far up the stream. 

This concession leaves us exactly where we 
were before, and bids us ask what is that 
point directly opposite which Jesus would 
have us reach. In answering this question, 



58 WHAT IS A CHRISTIAN 

we have no other guide than that wholesome 
and spiritually-minded common sense which 
we found to be everywhere necessary to the 
understanding of Jesus. 

A sound interpretation [of his teaching 
avoids these impossible extremes of literalism 
and at the same time affords a principle suf- 
ficiently lofty and powerful to serve as the 
supreme guide in the affairs of men and 

nations. 

I 

When we look closely at those sayings of 
Jesus which seem to inculcate the doctrine 
of non-resistance, we find that they are in 
reality nothing more than specific applica- 
tions of his fundamental principles of love 
and service. 

When these principles are applied to the 
differences which inevitably arise between 
men in everyday life, Jesus interpreted them 
as carrying with them three things; first, 
a demand that all men should recognize the 
rights and necessities of others, preferring 
to sacrifice themselves rather than to cause 



THE CHRISTIAN AND WAR 59 

others to suffer; second, the spirit of the 
utmost forbearance, patience, and self-con- 
trol in dealing with those who would inflict 
wrong upon us; third, the utter absence of 
the spirit of revenge in our attitude toward 
those who have wronged us. The disciple 
is to forgive unto seventy times seven. We 
are bidden to love our enemies, to return 
good for evil, to overcome evil with good. 

In these three principles is summed up the 
entire ethical philosophy of Jesus as it re- 
lates to the natural conflict of rights which 
inevitably takes place in an imperfectly devel- 
oped social order, as well as to the more 
serious disorders which arise from the pres- 
ence of evil and perverse men. 

Regarding these principles, it is easy to 
see at the outset that they run directly 
counter to the spontaneous impulses of human 
nature. It is natural for men to seek their 
own welfare, to assert their own rights, and 
to leave others to look out for themselves. 

The political economy of a century ago 
erected this principle of self-interest into the 



60 WHAT IS A CHRISTIAN 

governing law of human affairs, and declared 
that all that was necessary in this world was 
to give it a free rein and let the conflict of 
interests bring about a stable social order, 
as the balance of centrifugal and centripetal 
forces keeps the earth in its orbit. 

A further study of the laws which govern 
human relations, however, has cast serious 
doubt upon this principle; and economists 
to-day are seeking for the most efficient 
means of restraining the impulses of self- 
interest and insuring a wholesome regard 
among men for the interest of others. It 
may be we shall ultimately discover that the 
law laid down by Jesus Christ is in reality 
the soundest foundation for commercial pros- 
perity and social well-being. 
I There is no doubt, however, that the 
teaching of Jesus runs directly counter to 
natural impulse, nor can we doubt that 
history hitherto has been based on the op- 
posite principle of self-assertion. The law 
of the survival of the fittest has governed the 
rise and decay of empires ; and war has been, 



THE CHRISTIAN AND WAR 61 

from the dawn of time, the principal occupa- 
tion of the human race. 

Yet there can be no doubt that if these 
principles of Jesus were put in operation, 
they would go far to abolish strife of all 
kinds between men and nations. 

If we may assume that there is possible a 
just settlement for all differences of opinion 
and all conflicts of right, then the law of 
mutual regard and of mutual forbearance is 
the only foundation for the attainment of 
that end. 

Before we undertake to apply these princi- 
ples to the problem before us, it is necessary 
to ask how far they involve the doctrine of 
non-resistance. Do they forbid self-defense 
or the punishment of criminals? 

By no means. Love does not mean senti- 
mental indulgence or weak yielding to the 
impulses of others. The steadfast enforce- 
ment of righteousness is the truest love and 
the largest service. That father is not the 
most loving who is most weakly indulgent 



62 WHAT IS A CHRISTIAN 

toward his children, nor is there anything in 
experience to indicate that to allow violent 
and wicked men to have their own way and 
to work their will upon the weak and defense- 
less can have any good end. 

But experience increasingly shows that the 
steadfast application of the principles of for- 
bearance, patience, self-control, and forgive- 
ness are in the long run the most powerful 
weapons against oppression and wrong. A 
soft answer turneth away wrath. 

An immediate application of force may 
sometimes be necessary to; restrain the evil- 
doer and prevent the injury that he would 
work ; but when once he has been prevented 
from putting his evil impulses into effect, 
the application of the principles of Jesus to 
all further dealings with him is a much more 
effective way of meeting the situation than 
the opposite method of violence and revenge. 

We have learned that even in the punishment 
of criminals nothing is gained by undue sever- 
ity. At the opening of the nineteenth century 
more than a hundred crimes were punishable 



THE CHRISTIAN AND WAR 63 

by death under the English law, yet this 
severity did not avail to put an end to crime. 
We are coming to see that the object of 
punishment is not vengeance but reformation. 
The Warden of Sing Sing prison inaugurated 
a new era not long since when he went un- 
armed into a room filled with prisoners, sent 
out all the guards, and talked with the pris- 
oners, man to man, regarding various phases of 
their life together. In treating them as men 
and not as dogs he enlisted all of their own 
best impulses, and already we are told that 
the results are apparent in the temper of the 
men and their attitude toward the obliga- 
tions that are laid upon them. If this is true 
in dealing with hardened criminals, it is in- 
finitely more true in the common relation- 
ships of human life, wherein by far the 
greater portion of our differences grow out of 
our ignorance of each other's life and our fail- 
ure to understand each other's needs and 
desires. 



64 WHAT IS A CHRISTIAN 

II 

At this point the question arises, Can these 
principles be applied to international affairs? 
Can states be called upon to practice the law 
of self-sacrifice and service ? 

General von Bernhardi emphatically says, 
No; that the state exists to protect and 
enhance the welfare of its subjects, whose 
interests are jeopardized in any act of self- 
sacrifice on the part of the state; and that, 
therefore, the Christian law cannot be held 
to apply to international affairs. Let us 
look at this matter a little more closely. 

There can be no doubt that there is an 
element of truth in the contention that the 
powers and responsibilities of the state differ 
in many respects from those of the individual. 
Society is an organism. It is more than a 
mere aggregation of individuals, and its rights 
and duties are more than the sum of individual 
rights. 

The state exists not because individuals 



THE CHRISTIAN AND WAR 65 

have agreed together to band themselves into 
such an organization and to delegate to it 
certain of their own individual rights and 
powers, which they undertake henceforth 
to waive. Rather the state is brought into 
being through the very existence of a large 
number of people living together in a re- 
stricted territory, where their various needs 
and common interests create the necessity 
for an organized life. 

There are a great many things which society 
as a whole can do, which no individual ever 
could do. Both the need and the power to 
supply it are created through the existence 
of the common life; so that there is a very 
real sense in which a nation is to be regarded 
as a greater person, with its own rights, duties, 
and responsibilities, and with its own larger 
conscience. 

Even the mob spirit is something other than 
the sum of the individual impulses of the 
people who constitute it. Public opinion is not 
merely the sum of the opinions of the majority 
of individuals, or even that sum minus the 



66 WHAT IS A CHRISTIAN 

sum of the opinions of the minority. It is 
something more intangible and at the same 
time more real and powerful than this. 

The spontaneous personification of nations 
which takes place in our common speech 
illustrates a half-unconscious yet instinctive 
recognition of this truth. Uncle Sam, shrewd, 
tolerant, humorous, kindly, does not exist 
alone in the imagination of cartoonists. He is 
a real being, the embodiment in concrete form 
of all the common characteristics and im- 
pulses and ideals of the American people. 
Bluff, hearty John Bull is the spirit of Eng- 
land. A truth is expressed under the guise 
of these half -humorous personifications which 
defies analysis in the terms of logic. 

This STATE-PERSON of necessity exer- 
cises many powers and rights greater than 
those of the individual. The right of the 
state to punish wrong-doing is not simply the 
delegated blood right of the individual to 
vengeance. The state stands to the wrong- 
doer rather in the relation of a wise father to 
a wilful and rebellious child. No individual 



THE CHRISTIAN AND WAR 67 

could ever take that relation to the criminal. 
It belongs to the state as a matter of inherent 
right. 

The real question is, whether war is one of 
those essential rights and powers of the state. 

The question is in reality a double one; 
namely, Is war ever an essential right of the 
state, and must it be forever and necessarily 
a function of the state? 

In answering these questions, several con- 
siderations must be kept in mind. 

^The first is that the state itself exists as a 
power superior to and taking cognizance of the 
relations of individuals; so in all matters of 
conflict and dispute between individuals, the 
state exists to adjust these relations and to 
insure the establishment of justice. 

Hence all disputes and conflicts of interest 
between individuals which cannot be adjusted 
by private means and the application of 
the Christian spirit may find their proper 
adjustment through the organized life of the 
state. 



68 WHAT IS A CHRISTIAN 

But it is easy to see that no such larger and 
all-inclusive power exists with relation to 
states themselves. This means that while a 
great many minor matters of difference and 
dispute may easily be settled by conference 
and adjudication, in the larger matters which 
affect the essential life and well-being of the 
state itself there has hitherto been no possible 
arbitrament but that of reason and mutual 
concession, or failing that, the sword. 

In this connection it is necessary to keep 
in mind the fact that so far at least in human 
history there have been bad states as well as 
good states. At best, the life of the state is 
imperfectly moralized ; for while public opin- 
ion is something more than the sum of all the 
private opinions, nevertheless it is the product 
of private opinions, and waits upon the devel- 
opment of private character and judgment. 

If we have not succeeded in perfectly 
moralizing the relation of individuals to each 
other, still less have we been able to apply 
the principles of justice to all the relations of 
the state-person. 



THE CHRISTIAN AND WAR 69 

This being the case, it is inevitable that 
conflicts of interest should sometimes arise 
even between comparatively good states — 
conflicts touching interests so fundamental 
that no adjustment has hitherto been possible 
save through the appeal to the sword. Under 
such circumstances, to deny the right and 
justice of warfare is simply to shut one's 
eyes to real life and to try to live in an im- 
possible world of dreams. 

This is, of course, more plainly evident in 
the case of a conflict between a good state 
and a bad. Outside of the closet no one has 
ever denied the right of a peaceful and well- 
behaved people to defend themselves against 
an incursion of savages; and the right of 
any nation to defend itself against aggressions 
which would destroy the liberty of its people 
is equally well established. 

What is needed at this point is to face 
frankly the demands of common sense, and 
to rid ourselves of the uneasy feeling that this 
right somehow conflicts with the Christian 
ideal. 



70 WHAT IS A CHRISTIAN 

That it represents a state of affairs that 
falls short of the ultimate standard set by 
Jesus Christ for the life of men and nations 
there can be doubt; but defensive warfare, 
war in defense not only of national life and 
liberty but sometimes, it may be, even in 
defense of national ideals, is not only the right, 
but the duty of nations in a world so imper- 
fectly moralized as this one in which we live. 

When once we have plainly seen this truth, 
that the State-Person, in pursuance of its 
supreme ends, in protecting and developing 
the welfare of its people, is charged with a 
right and a responsibility which does not 
exist as between individuals, we begin to see 
how it may be that a Christian may love his 
neighbor as himself and stand ready to apply 
the principles of sacrifice and forbearance to 
the utmost degree in his personal relation- 
ships, and still consistently obey the call of 
his country to take up arms. 

The definition of war as one little girl's 
papa going out to murder some other little 



THE CHRISTIAN AND WAR 71 

girl's papa is nothing but sentimental bosh. 
When the welfare of the whole people is 
involved or a great principle is at stake, the 
individual ceases to exist as an individual and 
becomes only a cell in the body politic. His 
acts in this relation are no longer the acts of an 
individual. 

War is not legalized murder, but it is, or 
at least may be, the endeavor to defend the 
right and to attain the largest social well- 
being ; and even though it may be undertaken 
in a mistaken cause, it is still justified so far 
in the experience of humanity as the only 
known means whereby certain supreme ends 
of human existence could hitherto be attained. 

It is only on this ground that we can under- 
stand and appreciate the undoubted influences 
for good which have resulted from war. 

War demands the supreme sacrifice of the 
individual to the common weal. 

Hence in spite of all the suffering and heart- 
break involved, and in spite of the degrading 
and brutalizing influences which inevitably 



72 WHAT IS A CHRISTIAN 

accompany it, war has a remarkable power 
to heighten the moral tone of the community 
and to purify and ennoble the common life. 
No one can observe the seriousness and moral 
earnestness which characterizes the people 
of Europe in the present struggle without 
feeling that even this dreadful sacrifice may 
prove to be not too great a price to pay for 
such ennobling of humanity. 

It is undoubtedly true that wars have fre- 
quently had a remarkable effect on civilization. 

The Crusades, for example, broke down the 
tyranny of church and state, enlarged the 
boundaries of human thought, and marked 
the beginning of the modern period with its 
immeasurable developments of political and 
intellectual freedom. 

The French Revolution, with all its excesses, 
re-created the French nation. The Franco- 
Prussian War, brought about as it was by the 
intrigues of Bismarck and carried out with 
bitter and needless severity, nevertheless 
hammered the German people into unity and 
created the German consciousness; and its 



THE CHRISTIAN AND WAR 73 

effect upon France was in many respects no 
less beneficial. 

The American Revolution did almost as 
much for democracy in England as in America, 
and the Civil War not only destroyed slavery, 
but was followed by an unparalleled industrial 
and intellectual expansion of both the North 
and the South. 

The recognition of this principle also ex- 
plains and justifies the place held in history 
by the great struggles for liberty. The world 
would be infinitely poorer without the story 
of Thermopylae and Marathon, of Lepanto 
and Liege. 

Who shall dare to say that the characters 
of Leonidas and William Wallace and Arnold 
von Winkelried, of Gustavus Adolphus and 
Cromwell, of Washington and Grant, of 
Stonewall Jackson and Robert E. Lee are not 
among the noblest in the history of mankind ; 
knightly souls, as truly and loyally Christian 
as St. Francis or Thomas a Kempis or William 
Booth? 



74 WHAT IS A CHRISTIAN 

III 

But now, having recognized the worth and 
significance of human history and human in- 
stinct, and the place which war has actually- 
held as an instrument of God for the working 
out of His own great ends in the experience 
of the race, let us make haste to see the more 
excellent way foreshadowed in the Christian 
ideal. 

There is certainly no doubt, despite General 
von Bernhardi, that the Christian principles 
of consideration for others, of forbearance 
and self-control, and even of self-sacrifice, 
are capable of being applied in the relation of 
nations no less than in individuals. 

They have been illustrated many times in 
the history of Europe during the past few 
hundred years, even if it be true that some- 
times nations have maintained the attitude 
of forbearance for their own ends and as a 
cloak to their ulterior designs. Even such 
concessions bear eloquent witness to the possi- 
bility of a Christian policy. 



THE CHRISTIAN AND WAR 75 

The forbearance of England in the Vene- 
zuelan case, of Canada in the Fisheries 
dispute, and of the United States toward 
Mexico are all instances in point. 

Many important and vital questions have 
arisen in a hundred years between Great 
Britain and the United States, and more than 
once relations have been so strained that a 
single spark might have produced an explosion. 
Nevertheless, the resolute purpose of the 
national leaders to find some way for the 
peaceful solution of the difficulties has never 
failed to bear fruit, and only the conflagration 
which broke out last year in Europe over- 
shadowed one of the most significant events 
in human history, — the celebration of our 
hundred years of peace. 

Europe sneered at our pretense of dis- 
interestedness when we invaded Cuba, and 
again when we intervened a second time to 
restore order; but we have proven our faith 
by our works. 

With all her history of militarism and con- 
quest, and with all the wealth England has 



76 WHAT IS A CHRISTIAN 

undoubtedly received from her colonies, his- 
tory will bear witness to the fact that wherever 
she has gone she has taken up the white man's 
burden, and that the nations she has ruled 
are the greatest beneficiaries of her policy. 

Above all, who shall say that Belgium has 
not in these last days afforded a supreme 
example of national self-sacrifice; and has 
disproven von Bernhardi's doctrine by taking 
thereby a loftier place on the scroll of fame 
than she could ever have achieved by the 
prosperous discharge of the usual functions 
of the state. 

If we ask how this ideal of the Christianizing 
of world-relations is to be attained, there is no 
better answer than that of Kant, whose 
essay on "Perpetual Peace" remains after the 
lapse of a hundred years the profoundest 
utterance which has yet been made on this 
theme. 

Kant declared three things to be essential 
to a lasting world-peace — a peace which 
should be anything more than a temporary 



THE CHRISTIAN AND WAR 77 

intermission in a state of perpetual warfare. 
The first is "Representative Government"; 
the second is "The Political Organization of 
the World"; and the third is "The Spirit of 
Hospitality." 

By representative government Kant really 
meant what we have in mind when we talk of 
Democracy. 

Thoroughgoing democracy, or the direct 
exercise of the functions of government by the 
whole people, he did not believe in. He 
recognized the danger of the mob-spirit in 
government, the necessity which was embodied 
in the American Constitution of affording 
some check upon popular impulse. He knew 
that the tyranny of majorities may be as 
oppressive as that of an autocracy. He had 
no idea of intrusting the delicate adjustment 
of foreign relations to the clumsy devices of 
popular government. 

But he recognized no less that in the last 
analysis the people do the fighting and pay 
the bills. He felt that their best instincts 
are to be trusted, and that in the long run 



78 WHAT IS A CHRISTIAN 

they are more likely to do what is just and 
right than an irresponsible bureaucracy in- 
tent on furthering its own ambitions. So he 
insisted that governments must be responsible 
to the people and truly representative of the 
best public sentiment of the nation if inter- 
national relations are to be established on a 
sound basis. 

This of necessity carries with it the abolition 
of secret diplomacy. Not that a wise discre- 
tion must not be allowed to the agents of the 
government in the conduct of diplomatic 
negotiations; but secret treaties and un- 
acknowledged "gentlemen's agreements" be- 
tween foreign offices are a fruitful source 
of suspicion and distrust, and the intrigues of 
far-sighted diplomats have more than once 
plunged nations into needless strife. 

Only when the relation between states is 
regarded as a matter of public concern to be 
settled in the open, with all the cards on the 
table, can the people be assured that their 
true interests are being served. 

The wisest students of public affairs are 



THE CHRISTIAN AND WAR 79 

agreed that this is not the least important 
lesson to be learned from the present conflict 
in Europe, and that only by increasing the 
responsibility of the governments to the 
popular conscience and will can the founda- 
tions be laid for a lasting peace. 

Kant's second maxim finds expression to-day 
in the various schemes which are proposed 
for an international tribunal for the settle- 
ment of disputes, — with or without an armed 
power to enforce its decrees. 

We have already seen the necessity for this. 
Hitherto there has been no court of last resort, 
such as the state itself affords for its citizens 
in their disputes, save that of the sword. 

Kant was emphatically opposed to a "world- 
state," as destroying the sovereignty which is 
the very life of every state; but he saw as 
clearly as any one the necessity for some sort 
of machinery for the peaceful adjustment of 
international relations. Conflicts of interest 
are bound to arise. Justice must be assured 
and the interests of neutral states, the "inno- 
cent bystanders," must be safeguarded. 



80 WHAT IS A CHRISTIAN 

Since Kant's time two types of federated 
government have been worked out in human 
experience. 

The American Union, which in his day had 
not emerged from the experimental state, is an 
actual government, a super-sovereignty over 
sovereign states, such as Kant himself opposed. 

It is becoming increasingly evident in the 
United States that under the conditions of 
modern life the tendency in such a federation 
is for the sovereignty of the individual states 
to be more and more absorbed in the power 
of the central government. The Civil War 
proved that the Union is no mechanical 
mixture but an organic unity, and the tend- 
ency of the last twenty years has been to 
increase the centralized authority of the 
Federal Government. Nevertheless the peo- 
ple at large are fairly satisfied to have it so, 
and the interests of all are in the main pretty 
thoroughly safeguarded. 

But the Civil War also proves that such a 
league of peace may break down under the 
stress of peculiar circumstances, and it may 



THE CHRISTIAN AND WAR 81 

well be that while it works admirably in the 
case of a homogeneous people it would not be 
adapted to the case of nations so diverse in 
language and customs and interests as the 
peoples of the old world. 

The other type of a federated government 
is to be found in the British Empire. 

Here the central government exercises but 
the remotest shadow of authority. Canada 
and Australia and South Africa are to all 
intents and purposes independent nations, ex- 
ercising all the rights of sovereignty, includ- 
ing those of setting up tariff barriers and 
coining their own money, — powers forbidden 
to the American states. 

To the casual observer the bond which 
holds the British Empire together is a rope of 
sand, and the greatest surprise of the present 
war to Germany was the fact the colonies 
remained loyal to the mother country and 
furnished troops and munitions of war in the 
crisis. Even yet German statesmen can 
scarcely be convinced that if the struggle 
should be prolonged, Canada or India would 



82 WHAT IS A CHRISTIAN 

not get out from under the burden and leave 
the Empire to her fate. 

As a matter of fact nothing holds the British 
Empire together but sentiment. If England 
should attempt to exercise a real authority 
over her colonies, she would lose them in a 
day, — as no one knows better than England 
herself. She learned her lesson in 1776, 
and is not likely to make the same mistake 
again. 

But the very weakness of the empire is its 
strength. The one thing that statesmen are 
slowest to learn is that sentiment is the 
mightiest factor in human affairs. The 
British Empire is nothing in the world but 
an Arbitration League between great states, 
who for the sake of sentiment have agreed 
that they will not go to war with each other 
under any circumstances, but will find some 
way of adjusting their mutual interest at 
all costs. 

This suggests that after all the most im- 
portant of Kant's maxims is the third; namely, 
that of "Hospitality." It is for this reason 



THE CHRISTIAN AND WAR 83 

that we have ventured to introduce this dis- 
cussion of method into a study of essential 
Christianity ; for this is nothing less than the 
application of Christian principles to inter- 
national affairs. 

What Kant meant by " hospitality " is 
that nations must learn to rid themselves of 
race hatred and suspicion; that they must 
come to trust each other, and to subordinate 
their selfish impulses in the interest of peace 
and mutual welfare. 

As a matter of fact there are no irrecon- 
cilable interests between civilized states. 
France and England are hereditary enemies. 
They have fought each other from Crecy to 
Waterloo. Yet to-day they are fighting side 
by side. It is not many years since Kipling 

wrote, 

"Make ye no truce with Adam-Zad, 
The Bear that walks like a man." 

Russia was at that time regarded as England's 
most dangerous rival, both in the Near and 
the Far East. The Crimean War was fought 
to prevent her from securing Constantinople. 



84 WHAT IS A CHRISTIAN 

Now England sees no objection to such an 
event. All these traditional difficulties have 
been adjusted, and Germany has become the 
bete noire in the path of world-peace. To- 
morrow may witness a new alignment. 

When men have come to see the absurdity 
of all this, and have realized the essential 
solidarity of human interests in a world as 
compact and genuinely organic as this we 
live in has come to be, then we shall begin to 
apply the Christian principles of forbearance 
and mutual good will to international af- 
fairs, and the swords will be beaten into 
plowshares. 

It is evident that this Christianizing of 
national life, of the State-Person in its rela- 
tions with its peers, must be a fruit of the 
growing Christianization of public opinion. 

As individuals grow more Christian in their 
relations with each other, and their moral 
insight becomes correspondingly quickened, 
the field of international relations must 
inevitably be brought more and more under 
the dominion of the Christian ideal. 



THE CHRISTIAN AND WAR 85 

It is doubtless a far cry to the consumma- 
tion of this hope; but as the spirit of Jesus 
Christ takes an ever deeper hold on the hearts 
of men, they will not forever be content with 
war's crude and wasteful method of attain- 
ing international justice, but will strive more 
and more for a common understanding and 
mutual good will among the nations of the 
earth. 

It is objected to this hope that the warlike 
virtues of courage and self-sacrifice are among 
the greatest treasures of the human spirit, 
and that the abolition of war will reduce man- 
kind to the flabby bourgeois virtues of pros- 
perity and ease. 

The answer is found in all the glorious 
history of spiritual sacrifice. The sisters of 
charity who spend their lives in the service of 
the poor; the humble missionaries who pour 
out their souls without stint in behalf of the 
needy inhabitants of the dark places of the 
world ; the martyrs of science, the heroes of 
industry, and the innumerable multitude of 



86 WHAT IS A CHRISTIAN 

earnest spirits in every age who count not 
their lives dear unto themselves that they 
may be of service to their fellow men and 
establish the kingdom of righteousness unto 
the ends of the earth, are sufficient witness 
to the spiritual resources of the race. 

While the earth stands there will never 
be a time when men will not be called upon 
to sacrifice themselves for righteousness 5 sake. 
The Cross will not die out of human experi- 
ence, nor need we fear that it will ever become 
an easy thing in this world to do right. 

The physical heroism which faces death at 
the cannon's mouth makes a far less demand 
upon the resources of the human soul than 
the spiritual courage required of him who 
will follow Jesus Christ in a world of sin and 
spiritual conflict. 

"Peace ? When have we prayed for peace ? 

Is there no wrong to right ? 
Wrong crying to God on high 
Here where the weak and the helpless die, 
And the homeless hordes of the city go by, 

The ranks are rallied to-night ! 



THE CHRISTIAN AND WAR 87 

: Peace ? When have we prayed for peace ? 
Are ye so dazed with words ? 
Earth, heaven shall pass away 
Ere for your passionless peace we pray ! 
Are ye deaf to the trumpets that call us to-day, 
Blind to the blazing swords?" 

— Alfred Noyes. 



IV 

THE CHRISTIAN AND WEALTH 

The problem of war holds the central place 
in all our thinking just now by reason of the 
terrible holocaust which has overtaken 
Europe, but it is not the most fundamental 
ethical problem of mankind. 

The root cause of war is undoubtedly the 
desire of the strong to exploit the weak. 
Indeed a recent German economist and his- 
torian goes so far as to say that the political 
organization of mankind into states had its 
rise historically in the desire of a vigorous 
and predatory group to take possession of 
the products of toil of a weaker or less aggres- 
sive people. 

The fundamental problem of human civili- 
zation is that of the production and distribu- 
tion of goods. If Christianity is to afford 
the constructive principles upon which the 

88 



THE CHRISTIAN AND WEALTH 89 

highest human welfare must rest, it is neces- 
sary for us to ask what Christianity has to 
say on the economic problem. 

Practically the question assumes this form, 
Can a Christian hold wealth? or to state the 
question more broadly, Is Christianity com- 
patible with a social order in which men are 
divided into rich and poor ? 

Here again we are met at the outset with 
a confusion of tongues, evidencing a very 
general confusion of thought. 

On the one hand, there are those who de- 
clare that Jesus was a Socialist; that he 
believed in the abolition of private property, 
or even that he would have all things held in 
common; that his doctrine forbids every 
form and degree of wealth and enjoins ab- 
solute poverty and the refusal to make pro- 
vision for the future. 

On the other hand, there are those who argue 
that the institution of private property is so 
embedded in his teaching that his whole ethical 
system falls to the ground if the economic struc- 
ture of society should be materially changed. 



90 WHAT IS A CHRISTIAN 

If we turn from attempts to interpret the 
teaching of Jesus in a thoroughgoing way 
and look at the spontaneous practical atti- 
tude of men toward that teaching, we find 
the same confusion. 

On the one hand, there is a widespread 
feeling that riches are incompatible with 
Christianity, and that the church has be- 
trayed her Lord by the deference she has 
paid to wealth and power ; on the other hand, 
there are a great number of well-to-do and 
rich in the church who are conscious of no 
inconsistency between their religion and their 
business life. 

; On the one hand, St. Francis of Assisi is 
held up as the typical Christian. On the 
other hand, Mr. Rockefeller is admired as 
the type of a successful combination of busi- 
ness efficiency and spiritual character. • 



Again we turn to the teaching of Jesus 
to see if it affords any clear light upon this 
crucial problem of human life. 



THE CHRISTIAN AND WEALTH 91 

Once more we find the same apparent con- 
tradiction when we undertake to interpret 
him literally. 

The Sermon on the Mount declares that no 
man can serve God and Mammon, and bids 
men lay up their treasures in heaven rather 
than on earth. It tells them to take no 
thought for the morrow, but to live as the 
birds who have neither storehouse nor barn. 

When the rich young ruler came to Jesus 
declaring that he had kept the command- 
ments from his youth up and asking what 
further duty was laid upon him that he might 
enter the Kingdom of God, Jesus told him 
to sell all that he had and give to the poor. 

He declared that it was easier for a camel 
to go through the eye of a needle than for a 
rich man to enter into the Kingdom of God; 
and this needle's eye was not a hypothetical 
door in the wall of Jerusalem so small that 
camels could get through only by being 
stripped of their packs and getting down on 
their knees. This gate existed only in the 
imagination of commentators who wanted 



92 WHAT IS A CHRISTIAN 

to save the literal interpretation of Jesus's 
words and still leave some loophole for their 
rich patrons. Jesus meant a needle's eye, 
and the form of the statement declares the 
utter impossibility of a rich man being saved. 

Jesus's own practice conformed to this teach- 
ing. He held no property; he depended for 
his living on the generosity of his disciples, and 
the little group who traveled with him had a 
common purse and lived from hand to mouth. 

The church at Jerusalem after his death 
apparently followed the same principle. Its 
members sold their property and turned the 
proceeds into the common treasury. They 
gave themselves up to the service of worship 
and praise and the proclamation of the Chris- 
tian truth, and took no thought for business. 

So far the case seems to be clear for the 
absolute demand for poverty if one will be a 
loyal follower of Jesus. 

But, on the other hand, Jesus accepted the 
proposition of Zacchseus to give half of his 
goods to the poor and to restore fourfold 
to any man whom he had wronged. 



THE CHRISTIAN AND WEALTH 93 

When Nicodemus came to inquire the way 
of life, Jesus said not a single word about 
his property, but simply told him he would 
have to have a new spirit and attitude 
toward life if he would enter the Kingdom 
of God. 

The Apostles themselves left their homes 
to become companions of Jesus; but they 
did not surrender their property, and after 
the resurrection Peter and his friends went 
back to their fishing nets until the new call 
sent them out to spend their lives in proclaim- 
ing the gospel. 

The little family at Bethany whose friend- 
ship meant so much to Jesus seem to have 
been in comfortable circumstances; and one 
of Jesus's friends at least had a house in 
Jerusalem much larger than the majority of 
the houses, since it had an upper room fur- 
nished where the Master might eat the 
Passover with his Disciples. 

Even during the communistic period of 
the early church in Jerusalem, as we have 
seen, there was no requirement that its mem- 



94 WHAT IS A CHRISTIAN 

bers should sell their property for the common 
fund; and Ananias and Sapphira were 
punished not for keeping back part of their 
wealth, but for pretending they had given 
all when they had not. Outside of Jerusalem 
there is no trace of the practice of com- 
munism; and after the first few years the 
Jerusalem saints, having given up all their 
property, became a perpetual burden upon 
the other churches throughout the Empire 
and were supported by collections taken in 
Rome and Macedonia. 

In point of fact we find here, as we have 
found before, that there is no hope in literal- 
ism; that the demands of Jesus are not 
susceptible of being reduced to simple, hard 
and fast rules which draw a sharp line of 
demarcation through human life, on the one 
side of which lies duty and on the other side 
disaster. 

In some instances, his requirement was due 
to the peculiarities of an individual case; to 
some extent, it was governed by the general 
conditions of the age in which he lived; to 



THE CHRISTIAN AND WEALTH 95 

some extent, he employed in this connection 
the same method of paradox which we found 
so arresting and thought-compelling in other 
directions. 

St. Francis of Assisi accepted literally the 
injunction of Jesus to sell all and give to the 
poor. The policy did not prove successful 
or capable of wide application in St. Francis's 
own experience, and as a matter of fact, we 
honor him for the sweetness of his spirit, for 
the greatness of his love, and for his unshrink- 
ing loyalty to the truth as he understood it, 
rather than for his specific example in this 
connection. 

Origen of Alexandria in the third century 
carried out literally the suggestion of Jesus 
that some men are called to become eunuchs 
for the Kingdom of God ; but the good sense 
of the church has even from his own day 
repudiated such extreme measures, and has 
believed that the practice of celibacy ful- 
filled the most extreme requirement in the 
mind of Jesus. If this saying is to be inter- 
preted by common sense and Origen was 



96 WHAT IS A CHRISTIAN 

wrong in his interpretation though splendidly- 
loyal in his obedience, it is possible that the 
same is true of St. Francis. 

It is true that Jesus was not an economist. 
He was not concerned with the problems of 
statecraft or of business, with laying down 
the scientific laws which govern the economic 
realm. He refused to be a judge or divider. 
When appealed to regarding the lawfulness 
of paying tribute to Caesar, he simply told 
the Jews that so long as they accepted Caesar's 
money, they were under obligations to Caesar. 
He refused to discuss the political principle, 
but made clear the moral obligation. 

There can be no doubt that the ethical 
principles of Jesus are susceptible of wide 
application in the political and no less in the 
economic field, but we are left to discover 
for ourselves what those applications may be. 
Broadly speaking, anything which in the 
long run is true statecraft is Christian, and 
will be found to rest upon the ethical princi- 
ples laid down by Christ. In like manner, 
anything which proves ultimately to be sound 



THE CHRISTIAN AND WEALTH 97 

economic practice cannot be inconsistent with 
the Christian teaching. 

But the discovery and application of the 
Christian principle to the economic field is 
to be made not through slavish submission 
to the letter either of Jesus's teaching or his 
practice; but by the broad understanding 
of his moral purpose in the light of experience, 

II 

Turning, therefore, from the attempt to 
find in the words of Jesus a clear and well- 
defined rule for Christian practice, and apply- 
ing once more our principle of sanctified 
common sense to the interpretation of his 
teaching, we find a good many things which 
throw light on our problem and which sug- 
gest certain general principles which if carried 
out in human life would lead the world in the 
direction of a stable social order. 

To begin with, there are a number of things 
in the practice and teaching of Jesus which 
bear directly on the problem of wealth. 



98 WHAT IS A CHRISTIAN 

In the first place, Jesus displayed, both in 
his practice and in his teaching, a virtual in- 
difference to wealth. He tried to make men 
see that there are so many things of greater 
importance that it is a waste of life to spend 
it upon the acquisition of property. The 
pursuit of truth, the building of character, 
the practice of the spirit of helpfulness, — 
these are the aims which should absorb the 
soul and which leave small room for greed. 

Agassiz, the great American naturalist, 
was once offered $700 a night for a course 
of lectures; but he replied, "I haven't time 
to make money," and he kept on teaching 
natural science to undergraduates for a small 
salary, too absorbed in the discovery and 
proclamation of truth to care whether he 
made money or not. 

John Wesley was no ascetic and had little 
in common with St. Francis, but when the 
taxgatherer, supposing that so famous a 
man as Mr. Wesley must be living in corre- 
sponding style, wrote to him to say that he 
had not made return of his silver plate, Mr. 



THE CHRISTIAN AND WEALTH 99 

Wesley replied, "I had overlooked the matter ; 
I have two silver spoons, — one in London 
and one in Bristol ; that is all the silver plate 
I expect to possess while so many in England 
are starving for bread." 

This is the working of the spirit of Jesus 
in human life. 

In the next place, Jesus plainly recognized 
and declared the snare of riches. 

He saw how luxury and ease tend to under- 
mine the moral character and to unfit men 
for strenuous moral effort. He knew how 
easy it is for mankind to become the slaves 
instead of the masters of their possessions; 
to become so entangled with things that they 
are no longer masters of themselves or of 
the conditions of their life. He knew that 
wealth breeds power, and power tends to 
make men hard and tyrannical. It was for 
this reason that he was continually warning 
men against the snare of wealth. It is the 
care of the world and the deceitfulness of 
riches that choke the word of truth and 
make it unfruitful. It is the worship of 



100 WHAT IS A CHRISTIAN 

Mammon which crowds God out of the human 
heart. 

One of the most heart-gripping of the par- 
ables of Jesus is the story of that man whose 
wealth accumulated till he knew not what 
to do with it, and he said, "I will build 
larger storehouses and there I will bestow this 
great wealth, and I will say to my soul, 'Thou 
hast much goods laid up for many years — 
take thine ease, eat, drink and be merry/ ' 
and God said unto him, "Thou fool!" 

King Midas was gifted with the power to 
turn everything he touched into gold, and his 
heart rejoiced, but the reeds by the riverside 
whispered, "King Midas has ass's ears"; 
for the rose he plucked, the wine he drank, 
the lips of the child he kissed all turned to 
gold, and the king realized the utter folly 
that mistakes the true riches and seeks only 
material gain. 

Moreover, Jesus emphatically taught the 
necessity of getting rid of anything in life 
which has become a snare of the soul. Better 
be blind and maimed than to be led by sight 



THE CHRISTIAN AND WEALTH 101 

and touch into actions which destroy the 
soul. Better far that a man be poor and 
engaged in a daily struggle for existence than 
that his soul should be degraded into a money- 
bag and his whole life grow flabby and mon- 
strous, lapped around with luxury. 

Also the general principles of Jesus, his 
supreme doctrines of love and service, have 
an important bearing on the problem of 
wealth. 

In the first place, they demand the loftiest 
integrity. 

It does not require a wide experience of 
life to realize that absolute and unflinching 
honesty is not often the pathway to great 
wealth. We do not mean that all riches are 
dishonestly acquired, but the investigations 
and revelations of the last few years in 
America, and the perpetual struggle against 
graft and chicane in which we are engaged, 
give ground for the suspicion that most 
wealth is tainted money. 

We may not go as far as Oppenheimer, the 



102 WHAT IS A CHRISTIAN 

historian to whom we referred, who de- 
clares that the state itself had its origin in 
the desire to get something for nothing and 
to enjoy the possession of wealth earned by 
the labor of others; but there is a growing 
feeling on the part of all sober and intelli- 
gent students of human life that if the prin- 
ciples of absolute integrity were applied to 
the business world, it would cut deep into our 
great fortunes and insure a much wider dis- 
tribution of the products of industry. 

Jesus also insists that the ruling principle 
in life must be that of service. 

Economically, this means that the em- 
phasis in business must be not upon profits 
but upon the service of human need. 

Whether an element of profit is necessary 
in order to make business possible is a ques- 
tion for economics to settle, but it is un- 
doubtedly true that hitherto the accent has 
been on the wrong syllable. Business has 
been conducted for profit, and the service 
was incidental. The tendency, therefore, has 
been to increase the profit to the largest de- 



THE CHRISTIAN AND WEALTH 103 

gree which the traffic will bear, and to reduce 
the service to the minimum which the public 
will stand. 

The change of emphasis which is being in- 
sisted upon by the growing demand of public 
sentiment in its relation to all the business of 
the world is directly in line with the Christian 
principle. 

The law of love must further be applied to 
the whole field of the production of wealth. 

Men have been very slow to realize this 
truth. Human slavery persisted for eight- 
een centuries after Christ, and it is but little 
more than fifty years since the Chief Justice of 
the Supreme Court of the United States de- 
clared that the black man had no rights which 
the white man was bound to respect. We are 
still prone to interpret business purely in the 
terms of economic cost and profit, and are 
slow to measure the human factors involved. 

Of all the children in the United States 
between the ages of thirteen and sixteen, one 
in six is a wage earner, and there are whole 
industries in which the weight rests on the 



104 WHAT IS A CHRISTIAN 

shoulders of women and children. We are 
coming to see that this must not be; that 
economics must be interpreted in the terms 
of humanity; that the cost of a shirt waist 
is not the sum paid for the material and the 
labor employed in making it, but the priva- 
tion and suffering and moral risk run by the 
seamstress in her garret and the shopgirl in 
the department store. 

Men have always applied the test of Chris- 
tianity in a general way to the possession of 
wealth and have asked of the rich man, 
Where did he get it? The San Francisco 
millionaire, the foundations of whose fortune 
were laid by stage robbery, knows that if 
that were discovered, he would suffer in public 
esteem. 

Within the last few years, the world has 
come to feel that a fortune made in beer and 
whisky is tainted money — though we ordi- 
narily distinguish between the money made 
by selling liquor over the bar and that made 
through the possession of brewery or distillery 
stock. 



THE CHRISTIAN AND WEALTH 105 

But some day we shall understand that 
every dollar of wealth in the world has been 
paid for by human cost, by toil of heart and 
brain and hand; and that wherever the 
conditions of its production have dwarfed 
the lives and imperiled the souls of those 
whose toil created it, it is stained with blood. 

The most alarming thing which I have 
read in years was the admission made by the 
younger Mr. Rockefeller before the Indus- 
trial Commission not long ago, that he knew 
nothing whatever about the labor problem. 
Mr. Morgan, son and successor of the money 
king of the last quarter of a century, said 
essentially the same thing a few days later. 

Here are two men who control and ad- 
minister hundreds of millions of dollars. 
Their wealth is employed in many industries; 
it buys the labor of millions of their fellow 
human beings; yet they frankly admit that 
they are concerned only with the cash profit 
on their investments, and that they know 
absolutely nothing about the conditions under 
which those profits are made. 



106 WHAT IS A CHRISTIAN 

That is an awful thing to say. These 
men have no right not to know the labor 
problem. They are directly responsible for 
the bodies and souls of millions of men, with 
their wives and children. If it is impossible 
for the bankers who control the industries 
of our day to understand and be responsible 
for the labor conditions under which their 
wealth is created, then the foundations are 
laid for the greatest revolution in human 
history. For in the name of humanity, 
society must wrest from these men the con- 
trol of human industry in order that it may 
be administered intelligently in the interest 
of mankind. 

The tyranny of six per cent must be over- 
thrown. This world does not exist for the 
sake of wealth, but for the sake of folks; 
and it is an intolerable thing that the control 
of human lives should be vested in young men 
who have no interest in or knowledge of the 
fundamental human problem. 

Finally, the law of love and service governs 
the use that shall be made of one's wealth. 



THE CHRISTIAN AND WEALTH 107 

All men are trustees of society for their 
possessions. 

The world has made great progress in this 
direction in the last hundred years. It has 
come to pass that multi-millionaires maintain 
toward the world a somewhat apologetic at- 
titude, as though they were half -ashamed of 
their wealth. Mr. Carnegie declared a few 
years ago that it is a disgrace for a man to 
die rich, and he has been exhausting his in- 
genuity in devising methods of disposing of 
his wealth in ways that shall be most useful 
to mankind. It was said the other day that 
the benefactions of Mr. Rockefeller have 
amounted to a quarter of a billion ; and the 
most miserly business man of the last gener- 
ation, Russell Sage, left at his death his 
entire fortune to be distributed for the public 
good. 

We do not always realize, however, that 
the principle holds good for the man whose 
wealth is counted in hundreds or thousands no 
less than for him whose fortune numbers mil- 
lions. Whatever we have, we have not for 



108 WHAT IS A CHRISTIAN 

ourselves, to employ for selfish ends; but 
we hold it in trust for our neighbor. 

Ill 

In all this we have been anticipating the 
application of the principles of Jesus to the 
conditions of modern life. 

If the law of integrity must be expanded 
into a recognition of the right of labor to a 
larger share in the profits and the right of 
the public to more efficient service; and if 
the law of love must be held to govern the 
production of wealth no less than its use, 
then Christianity is bound to cut deep into 
the historic social order. 

Christianity plainly sets itself in opposi- 
tion to the economic interpretation of life. 

It insists that not the production of wealth 
is the chief aim nor the ruling motive in human 
history, but the production of manhood, — 
however important the economic factor may 
have been, and however necessary it may be to 
take it into account in any attempt either to 
explain the past or to control the future. 



THE CHRISTIAN AND WEALTH 109 

The economic life is concerned only with 
producing the material for living. Chris- 
tianity is the assertion of the supremacy of 
the spirit over the flesh, of manhood over 
material possessions. 

It protests against the tyranny of things. 
It bids men free themselves from the entangle- 
ment of worldly possessions ; to be too great 
of soul and too high of purpose to go forever 
bound to the satisfaction of their physical 
wants. It is better that a man should know 
truth and feed his soul on beauty and stretch 
himself in aspiration after unattainable ideals 
than that he should be a well-fed and pam- 
pered animal, forever in bondage to food and 
clothing and his physical body. 

In particular Christianity sets itself in 
opposition to luxury and self-indulgence. It 
protests against the senseless extravagance 
which spends its life in mere social display 
and misses all the worth-while ends of 
human existence. Monkey dinners at New- 
port, balls at which the refreshments cost 
hundreds of dollars per plate, and all of that 



110 WHAT IS A CHRISTIAN 

sort of thing, stand forever condemned by 
the simple appeal of Christianity for moral 
heroism and spiritual worth. 

Thus Christianity recognizes the necessity 
of adjusting oneself to existing social and 
economic conditions, and lays down princi- 
ples by which men are to be governed under 
all conditions. 

If the Christian man is born to the posses- 
sion of wealth, Christianity does not require 
him of necessity to rid himself of his wealth ; 
but it bids him be bigger than his money, to 
refuse to become a slave to it, to maintain 
his spiritual life and freedom in spite of it, to 
regard it as a means rather than as an end 
in itself, and to use it not for selfish indulgence 
but for the service of his fellow men. 

If the Christian man finds himself in a 
social order where the exercise of his gifts of 
mind and heart lead to the possession of 
wealth, Christianity has no word of condem- 
nation for him; but bids him maintain his 
integrity, to sacrifice his economic interests 



THE CHRISTIAN AND WEALTH 111 

unhesitatingly whenever they come in con- 
flict with the demands of the soul, to put the 
largest possible degree of Christian considera- 
tion and brotherhood into his business life, 
and to employ the wealth which he has thus 
acquired in whatever way shall contribute 
most to the well-being of humanity. 

But when all this is said, it remains true 
that the application of the teaching of Jesus 
even in its broadest principles to the economic 
life of the world tends utterly to transform 
it, to change its emphasis from economic suc- 
cess to human service. 

There is reason to believe that when this 
influence has had its perfect work, the result 
will be a transformation of the economic life 
of man as thoroughgoing and complete as 
has already been brought about in the politi- 
cal world in the transition from a centralized 
imperial authority to democracy. 

If Christianity requires that human costs 
be considered as of paramount importance 
in the production of wealth, if it insists no 
less upon absolute justice in the distribution 



112 WHAT IS A CHRISTIAN 

of the products of industry, if it enthrones 
human values in all the relations of men with 
each other, it means sooner or later the aboli- 
tion of poverty and no less the abolition of 
great wealth. 

Christianity does not mean the mechanical 
leveling of human society. It recognizes 
diversities of gifts and capacities, and it is 
entirely compatible with a distribution of 
wealth which is proportionate to the varying 
contributions men make to the world's life 
by reason of this human diversity. None 
the less a world thoroughly Christianized will 
be a world which no longer rests the weight 
of the social structure upon the mud-sills 
of economic slavery and degradation. 

It is the ultimate aim of Christianity to 
create a social order in which the weakest and 
humblest shall have a fair opportunity to 
develop his powers and capacities in the free 
exercise of such gifts of mind and heart as 
God has given him; a world in which there 
shall no longer be a few who are oppressed by 
their own luxury, degraded by idleness and 



THE CHRISTIAN AND WEALTH 113 

self-indulgence, and a great multitude whose 
lives are dwarfed and crippled by lack of 
the necessities of life ; but in which the laws 
of justice and brotherhood shall have so 
equalized human conditions as to make it 
possible for every human being to stand 
erect, a free man, and to devote himself 
freely to the service of God. 



V 

THE CHRISTIAN IDEAL 

War and wealth are the two most serious 
problems in human society, and a study of the 
relation of Christianity to these involves, as 
we have seen, a fairly comprehensive survey 
of the whole field of Christian ethics. 

It is desirable, however, to sum up the 
Christian ideal a little more completely and 
systematically. 

We have seen what were the main out- 
lines of the ethical teachings of Jesus. 

We approach the matter now from the other 
side and endeavor to sum up the net impression 
of Christianity upon the thought of mankind. 

In the light of everything that Jesus taught, 
and in the light as well of nineteen centuries 
of Christian teaching and influence, what 
kind of man is to be regarded as a perfect 
Christian ? 

114 



THE CHRISTIAN IDEAL 115 



Before we take this question up in detail, 
however, one very important observation 
must be made. 

We have been discussing Christianity up 
to this point entirely from the point of view 
of theory; first, its philosophical theory, its 
interpretation of life, and second, its ethical 
theory, the demand it makes upon life. 

But Christianity is not primarily a theory ; 
it is an experience. Christianity is a life. 
It had its beginning in the experience of 
friendship and daily association with Jesus. 
It persisted after his death because of the 
spiritual experience of the early disciples, 
growing out of their relation to him. 

It has endured through nineteen centuries 
because of its spiritual vitality, because of its 
dynamic quickening of the emotional life, 
inspiring the hearts of men with courage and 
zeal, enlarging and transforming their lives 
and creating within them the ideals we have 
sought to describe. 



116 WHAT IS A CHRISTIAN 

It is impossible to exaggerate the importance 
of this distinction. The world has had many 
ethical theories. What it has lacked is a 
moral dynamic. 

Lecky , the English historian, in a well-known 
passage pointed out the utter failure of the 
lofty stoical ideal to exert any real influence 
upon human conduct, and declared that it was 
reserved for Christianity to present to mankind 
in the character of Jesus a personality so win- 
some and powerful that the brief record of his 
active life has done more to soften and re- 
generate mankind than all the disquisitions of 
philosophers and moralists. 

Life always comes before theory, in point 
of time. Men ate for thousands of years 
before they reasoned out the science of 
physiology. They enjoyed roses and violets 
long before they elaborated the science of 
botany. 

So they loved and hated, they lived together 
in communities and nations, and sought to 
work out in practical experience the problem 
of human relations, long before any system- 



THE CHRISTIAN IDEAL 117 

atic attempt was made to construct a the- 
ory of the ethical life. 

The same principle is equally true in the 
religious realm. Men did not first construct a 
theological interpretation of the universe and 
then endeavor to experience their theology. 
They experienced emotions of wonder and awe, 
of reverence and worship, and constructed their 
religious theories to interpret the experience. 

Christianity builds upon the foundation of 
universal human experience. Mankind is in- 
curably religious. Among the Jewish people 
this religious impulse reached its highest de- 
velopment and expressed itself in the purest 
form. 

Jesus Christ coming into the midst of the 
religious life of Judaism simply purified and 
vivified the religious ideals of his race, and 
raised the religious emotions of his . followers 
to the height of a spiritual passion which 
became a life-giving, fructifying influence in 
the world, having power to reproduce itself 
in the lives of others with whom the first 
disciples came in contact. 



118 WHAT IS A CHRISTIAN 

Christian theology is nothing in the world 
but an attempt to rationalize that experience, 
to explain and interpret it. Christian ethics 
is but the attempt to express in a complete 
and systematic fashion the ways in which the 
Christian impulses find normal expression in 
human life. 

A mere philosophical and ethical theory 
would have been superseded long ago. Chris- 
tianity has survived the centuries because of 
this living experience which has knit the 
generations together in a continuity of life 
and feeling. 

Paul and Peter had little in common on the 
intellectual side. They were made blood- 
brothers by their common devotion to their 
Master, and their common experience of 
heightened religious feeling and quickened 
ethical purpose which grew out of it. 

The theology of Justin Martyr and Origen, 
of St. Augustine and St. Francis, of Thomas 
Aquinas and John Calvin differs not only in 
many particulars, but also not infrequently 
in fundamental principles; but they are all 



THE CHRISTIAN IDEAL 119 

sharers of a common spiritual experience. 
They have all drunk from this stream of 
warm spiritual emotion and dynamic moral 
purpose which has flowed through human 
history from the personality of Jesus. 

The critics of Christianity have seldom given 
adequate consideration to this vital fact. 

They have addressed themselves to a dis- 
cussion of Christian theory, and have never 
been at a loss to find gaps and flaws in it, 
whereupon they consider that they have done 
away with Christianity. They forget that 
life is the fact, and theory but the interpreta- 
tion of the fact. No man's digestion was 
ever directly affected by the limitations of his 
knowledge of physiology. 

Brudder Jasper, the darky preacher of 
Richmond, had a famous sermon on "The 
sun do move." He saw it in the morning on 
one side of the house and in the afternoon on 
the other. The house hadn't moved, hence 
the sun must have moved. We smile at 
Brother Jasper's logic, but we set our watches 
by the sun as well as he. 



120 WHAT IS A CHRISTIAN 

The Christian Scientist who believes that 
matter is an illusion, and the materialist 
who denies all spiritual existence, both build 
their houses out of brick and mortar. 

To have a mistaken theory is unfortunate, 
but to ignore facts is tragic. The life of 
Christianity is the most significant fact in 
the history of the last nineteen centuries, 
and the one most commonly ignored by his- 
torians. 

The central thing in Christianity, viewed 
as life rather than theory, is its experience of 
God. 

The Christian believer has experienced an 
emotional exaltation so unique and powerful 
that it seems nothing less than the immediate 
contact of the soul with the divine. It car- 
ries with it the quickening of his spiritual im- 
pulses, the purifying of his moral insight, the 
strengthening of all his loftier ethical purposes. 
It makes him a wiser, stronger, better man. 
It implants within him a spirit of good will 
which impels him to spend himself in the 
service of his fellow men. 



THE CHRISTIAN IDEAL 121 

This spiritual experience is not at all times 
equally vivid and powerful, nor does it seize 
upon all individuals in the same way or to the 
same degree. It is subject to all the psycho- 
logical laws which govern the emotional experi- 
ences of mankind in every department of life. 

The love of a mother for her babe, of a son 
for his mother, of husbands and wives, is not 
always equally vivid. The impulses which 
are set in motion in moments of strong feeling 
are taken up by the moral will and purpose 
and carried out in everyday life under all its 
fluctuations of emotional intensity ; but these 
warm human emotions are what make human 
life the rich and colorful and beautiful thing 
it is, and so it is this deep undercurrent of 
spiritual emotion which constitutes vital 
Christianity. 

From this point of view a Christian is one 
who shares the Christian emotion and experi- 
ence. His theological interpretation of it 
may be faulty, his answer to the ethical 
demand of Jesus may be imperfect; but 
because his life has been touched by the 



122 WHAT IS A CHRISTIAN 

power of the Christian spirit he is more truly 
a Christian than many another whose theo- 
logical theories and ethical ideals may be per- 
fect, but who has never connected his theories 
with life. 

The greatest word in Christian speech is 
love. Jesus himself summed up the whole 
meaning of life in the command, "Thou 
shalt love the Lord thy God with all thy heart, 
and thy neighbor as thyself." That man is a 
Christian whose life is moved in any degree by 
that spirit ; and he is Christian to the degree 
to which he is impelled and controlled by it. 

II 

We come now to ask in the light of all we 
have learned of the teaching of Jesus and of the 
essential nature of the Christian experience, 
what kind of man a perfect Christian would 
be. What is the Christian ideal for the 
personal life? How will the vital experience 
in the soul of a perfect Christian express itself 
in actual life ? 

If our understanding of the spirit and pur- 



THE CHRISTIAN IDEAL 123 

pose of Jesus is correct, such a man will not 
be an ascetic, a bloodless and anaemic recluse, 
living in retirement and spending his life in 
meditation and devotion. He will not find it 
necessary to withdraw himself from the normal 
life of mankind or to wear himself out in a 
fruitless struggle against the normal impulses 
of life. Such a man will not be morbidly 
introspective, forever engaged in feeling his 
own spiritual pulse or pulling his spiritual 
experience up by the roots to see whether it is 
growing. 

Nor, on the other hand, is it at all certain 
that such a man will of necessity be a radical 
reformer, a wielder of the big stick against 
all the wrongs and failures of human society. 
There will doubtless be times when he will be 
called upon to strike mighty blows against 
wrong and oppression, but there could be no 
greater mistake than to suppose that only the 
ascetic on the one hand and the reformer on 
the other are to be regarded as the typical 
Christian. 

Asceticism is a false and morbid ideal, born 



124 WHAT IS A CHRISTIAN 

in part of pagan philosophy and in part of a 
mistaken devotion to the letter of a few of 
Jesus's sayings. Spirited and aggressive re- 
form has often been the product of the Chris- 
tian motive, but it is a tool to accomplish 
certain results, one which can only be applied 
under certain conditions and must always be 
wielded with self-restraint and wisdom. The 
reformer ought to be a Christian and the 
Christian must sometimes be a reformer, but 
the Christian ideal is much larger than this, 
and must not be confused with the narrower 
purpose and more limited function of reform. 

If we should undertake to describe a perfect 
Christian life on the positive side, I think we 
should say that it would be characterized, 
first of all, by the recognition of spiritual 
forces and relations. It would be a deeply 
religious life in the sense, not of assiduous 
devotion to religious forms and practices, but 
of living continually under the stimulating 
consciousness of its spiritual heritage. 

Its attitude toward God would not differ 
essentially from that of a splendid and loyal 



THE CHRISTIAN IDEAL 125 

and hard-working son who is a partner in his 
father's business, who finds in his father's 
friendship and comradeship a great joy and 
a powerful stimulus in carrying out the respon- 
sibilities of his daily life. 

Such a Christian life as this would be great- 
souled. That is to say, it would not be moved 
by petty ends and mean motives. It would be 
incapable of being absorbed by trivial things. 

The indictment which Christianity brings 
against so much of human life is that it is not 
worth while. 

"For a cap and bells our lives we pay, 
Bubbles we buy with a whole soul's tasking." 

To pursue amusement and pleasure, social 
prestige, political ambition and business 
success as the chief things in life, is to 
betray a woeful lack of perspective; to get 
the whole center of gravity of life in the 
wrong place. It is not that any of these 
things are wrong in themselves, so that the 
Christian must withdraw from them and live 
as though they were not; but that they 



126 WHAT IS A CHRISTIAN 

should be mere incidents of a life devoted to 
higher ends. 

The Christian is one who is engaged upon 
the great task of building a character worthy 
to endure beyond this brief experience; of 
establishing in the world the great ideals of 
purity and justice and truth; of helping his 
fellow men in their sorrows and struggles ; of 
establishing the kingdom of righteousness and 
peace and joy in holiness of spirit. 

To imagine that such an one ought to be too 
solemn to find pleasure in a jest, too serious 
to take any relaxation in play or pleasure, too 
conscious of life's tragedies ever to unbend 
from his stern devotion to the moral impera- 
tive, too absorbed in the contemplation of 
heaven to know or care anything about the 
affairs of this life, is utterly to misconceive 
the spirit and attitude of Jesus or the real 
demand of the Christian ideal. 

A Christian is one who uses all these things 
merely as a means to a larger end, and so is 
everywhere master of himself and of the 
conditions of life instead of becoming a slave 



THE CHRISTIAN IDEAL 127 

to his impulses or to the circumstances in 
which he is placed. 

Such a life will be characterized by the spirit 
of kindness and love. 

Love is not sentimental gush nor easy- 
going tolerance — it is entirely compatible 
with strength and dignity, with resoluteness 
of purpose, with keen endeavor to accomplish 
the work of the world. 

It simply means the spirit of modesty, of 
considerateness, of courtesy, of patience and 
forbearance ; the recognition of other's rights, 
the set purpose to serve and please. It means 
unselfishness. It means a life measured not in 
terms of what one is going to get out of it 
but of how much one can put into it. It 
means a high moral earnestness, an unhesitat- 
ing consecration of oneself to the good of 
mankind and the service of the kingdom of 
God. 

Such a life is a life which will not shrink 
from sacrifice, which has learned to put first 
things first, and knows that nothing which life 
can give can ever make up to any man the 



128 WHAT IS A CHRISTIAN 

loss he sustains when he subordinates right to 
self-interest, or fails by reason of cowardice or 
indifference to be true to his own loftiest ideals. 

Ill 

When once the Christian ideal is interpreted 
in this broad and sincere fashion, an innumer- 
able multitude of examples rush to mind. 

One recent magazine writer convinced him- 
self that the Christian church was a failure as 
soon as it was born, because it misapprehended 
its Master and sought to inculcate philosophy 
and win ecclesiastical power instead of allow- 
ing the religious impulse to run a perfectly 
free course in the world. Another is quite 
sure that there are no Christians left; that 
perhaps indeed there never have been any, — 
with the possible exception of St. Francis. 

But when one looks frankly and simply 
at the history of Christianity, interpreting the 
Christian ideal in the light of ordinary good 
sense, though with a clear recognition of the 
lofty purity of its moral imperative, it becomes 
clear that while there has never been and can 



THE CHRISTIAN IDEAL 129 

never be a perfect Christian, a man whose 
life completely embodies and illustrates the 
whole significance of Christian love, neverthe- 
less, from the days of the Apostles until now 
an innumerable multitude of whom the world 
was not worthy have borne witness to the 
power of the Christian motive and have 
handed down the torch of Christian light and 
life to succeeding generations. 

St. Francis was indeed a Christian, not be- 
cause of his poverty or his asceticism, but in 
virtue of his splendid loyalty to the truth as 
he understood it, and above all of the exhaust- 
less tenderness of his love, 

A very different type was Martin Luther, 
rugged, uncouth and simple, but he was no 
less a Christian when, in the light of the insight 
that any man might draw near to God in the 
simplicity of his own heart, without need of 
priest or mediator, he faced the emperor and 
the church with the noble words: "Here I 
stand; I can do no other, God help me!" 
; Reformers whose zeal purified the state, 
established justice and advanced the cause of 



130 WHAT IS A CHRISTIAN 

liberty and democracy: Calvin at Geneva, 
John Knox in Scotland, Garrison and Wendell 
Phillips in America, were nobly Christian 
in their loyalty to justice and righteousness 
and their uncompromising opposition to op- 
pression and wrong at all cost. 

Lord Shaftesbury spent his whole life and 
fortune in self-sacrificing service of the poor 
and oppressed, and when he died, uncounted 
thousands of the common people followed his 
casket through the streets of London to its 
resting place in Westminster Abbey, while 
grimy newsboys, the tears marking white 
furrows down their cheeks, said one to another, 
"Our Earl is dead." 

William Booth left the ministry of the 
Methodist church that he might give himself 
unreservedly to the service of the London 
slums. 

Florence Nightingale faced death in the 
trenches of the Crimea to minister to the 
wounded and suffering. 

The heart of David Livingstone is buried 
in the Africa he 'died to save, and on the slab 



THE CHRISTIAN IDEAL 131 

that covers his body in Westminster Abbey- 
is inscribed his noble appeal to the Christian 
nations to heal the hurt of Africa, " the open 
sore of the world." 

But not monks and reformers and phi- 
lanthropists and missionaries alone have em- 
bodied the spirit of Jesus Christ. 

Washington was a Christian when he stood 
in simple dignity for liberty and justice, and 
by his wisdom and integrity guided the infant 
republic to the establishment of a stable and 
just government. He was Christian when he 
put aside all thought of ambition and refused 
to allow the plot of his officers to offer him 
the crown so much as to come to a head. 

Garibaldi was Christian when he struggled 
to liberate Italy from the cruel oppression of 
Austria and said to the young men of his 
country, "I promise you forced marches, 
short rations, bloody battles, wounds, im- 
prisonment and death — let him who loves 
home and fatherland follow me!" 

Abraham Lincoln was a Christian states- 
man when he freed the slaves, and when by 



132 WHAT IS A CHRISTIAN 

example no less than precept he taught his 
countrymen how to carry forward their great 
task "with malice toward none, with charity 
for all, with firmness in the right as God gave 
them to see the right." 

Who shall say that a soldier like Philip Sidney 
was not a Christian, who when he was dying 
on the field of battle gave the cup of water 
someone brought him to a wounded comrade 
with the words, "You need it more than I." 

In St. Paul's Cathedral in London is a 
simple cenotaph erected to the memory of 
Chinese Gordon, who was murdered at Khar- 
tum. On it is this inscription: "To the 
memory of Charles George Gordon, who 
always and everywhere gave his strength 
to the weak, his substance to the poor, his 
sympathy to the suffering, and his heart to 
God." 

These are the outstanding lives, the heroes 
of the faith. With them comes a great multi- 
tude which no man can number, who through 
great tribulation have maintained their loyalty 
to the spirit and purpose of their Master. 



THE CHRISTIAN IDEAL 133 

They all, from the least to the greatest, are 
fragmentary lives. They would have been 
the last to claim virtue for themselves, the 
first to confess that they were chief of sinners. 
As has been well said, Christianity is a flying 
goal. The ideal itself grows ever more lofty 
and perfect as our understanding broadens 
and deepens. We have this treasure in 
earthen vessels. It could not be otherwise 
in such a world as that in which we live. 

To shut our eyes to actual conditions and 
spend ourselves in the pursuit of unreal and 
impossible fantasies is a waste of energy, and 
an utter failure to comprehend the spirit 
and purpose of the loftiest spiritual truth the 
world has yet received. 

On the other hand, to fix our eyes on the 
weaknesses and faults of good men, and to 
deny the power and worth of the Christian 
ideal because it has hitherto found but im- 
perfect fulfilment in any life, is idle folly. 

The Christian ideal is that of a life marked 
by simple purity and integrity, and moved by 
great-hearted devotion to the service of God 



134 WHAT IS A CHRISTIAN 

and man. Such an ideal may be set aside 
when any of its critics can suggest one that is 
worthier or which has more power to command 
the devotion of men. 

IV 

The standards of personal character do 
not, however, exhaust the Christian ideal. 
It is true that the emphasis both in the teach- 
ing of Jesus and in the historic development of 
Christian ethics is upon the individual life, but 
it is always the individual in social relations. 

The present generation has witnessed the 
greatest expansion in Christian thought since 
the Reformation, in the growing recognition 
of the social significance of Christianity. 

It is a commonplace of present-day discus- 
sions that the solidarity of mankind has been 
very greatly enhanced by the developments of 
the last hundred years. Families, communities, 
and nations no longer live in isolation from 
each other, but the whole world is bound 
together in the most complex web of mutual 
interest and mutual dependence. 



THE CHRISTIAN IDEAL 135 

As a result the social obligations of men 
have been intensified. New definitions of 
sin have been made necessary, new applica- 
tions of old ethical principles are revealed. 
The highwayman of the seventeenth century 
robbed his victim at the point of a pistol; 
his successor in our day organizes a blue- 
sky mining company, or sells building lots in 
the bottom of a ravine. Men formerly 
committed murder by knife or poison ; to-day 
by selling impure milk or putting the price of 
ice beyond the reach of the poor. 

All this has necessitated a broader inter- 
pretation of Christian ethics. A thousand 
new questions have arisen. What is the 
bearing of Christianity upon the duty of a 
working man in the matter of labor unions, 
or the question of the open shop ? What has 
it to say to the holder of Standard Oil or 
Steel Trust stock ? 

The responsibility for injustice and wrong 
has become so widely distributed as to lose its 
weight upon the individual conscience. A 
few years ago the representative of one of the 



136 WHAT IS A CHRISTIAN 

popular magazines began investigating polit- 
ical graft in American municipal government. 
He began by considering the tribute exacted 
by the police department from the resorts of 
vice. This led on the one hand to the owner- 
ship of property, the existence of slums and 
tenements; and on the other hand to the 
influences which brought about the election 
of city officials. Presently he discovered that 
public service corporations were involved. 
More than once it happened that the men 
who financed a campaign against vice grew 
hostile when the investigation began to lay 
bare the wider ramifications of the evil of graft. 

In the end the investigator summed up 
years of study by throwing the responsibility 
back upon the whole business organization, 
and — contrary to the maxim of Burke — 
indicted the whole people. The recent in- 
vestigations of industrial conditions in Colo- 
rado have brought to light a similar shifting 
of responsibility. 

The significance of all this for our discussion 
is to indicate that if Christianity is to have 



THE CHRISTIAN IDEAL 137 

any meaning for the modern world with its 
vast complex of social and industrial relations, 
its ethics must be interpreted in a broader 
way than ever before. 

It is not enough to ask what is the duty of 
individuals in their direct personal contact 
with each other; but how the spirit of the 
Christian ethics can find embodiment in the 
whole web of the social order. 

A little reflection shows, however, that no 
new principles are required. The application 
of the laws of love and service to the new con- 
ditions is the only thing which can purify 
modern life and destroy the abuses under 
which mankind is suffering to-day. 

The social ideal of Christianity is that of 
a world bound together by mutual service; 
a world so organized that the power of evil 
men to exploit their weaker or less fortunate 
neighbors shall be reduced to a minimum; a 
world in which all discoverable injustices in 
the organization of society shall be eliminated. 

If this results in lessening the profits which 
accrue to any social group, this only means 



138 WHAT IS A CHRISTIAN 

that hitherto this group has been getting more 
than its fair share of the product of toil. 

A clear-eyed and courageous Christianity 
must insist that no man has discharged his 
full duty when he has applied the Christian 
spirit to his concrete personal relations; but 
that his conscience no less than his practical 
judgment must be socialized until he shall 
apply in all the multiplied activities of his 
business and political life the same funda- 
mental principles which bid him sacrifice his 
own interests for the sake of his fellows, 
and shall do his part to establish justice and 
good will as the organic law of the social order. 

It is worthy of note that when Jesus sought 
a single name by which to make known the 
total aim and purpose of his activity he found 
it in the Kingdom of God. 

The chief good, the pearl of great price to 
purchase which it was fitting that a man 
should sell all that he had, was neither individ- 
ual happiness nor individual salvation. It 
was the Kingdom of God, the redeemed and 



THE CHRISTIAN IDEAL 139 

glorified social order in which the will of God 
should inform and permeate every relation of 
the entire structure, so that the whole of hu- 
manity should be lifted up to the level of the 
perfect social ideal. 

The glowing promises of the closing chapters 
of the Book of Revelation have to^do not with 
a Paradise in some distant star, but with a 
City of God which cometh down from God 
out of Heaven, adorned as a bride for her 
husband, to make this world its permanent 
abiding place. Into it shall enter nothing 
that defileth or that loveth and maketh a lie ; 
but they shall bring the honor and the glory 
of the nations into it. 

This is the supreme vision which Christian- 
ity sets before mankind. The world can 
never go back to the individualistic faith of 
our fathers. No man to-day can be thoroughly 
and vitally a Christian who does not make 
the achievement of this perfect social order 
the supreme hope of his heart and the supreme 
end of his practical endeavor. 



VI 

THE CHRISTIAN HOPE 

In all this discussion of the beliefs and ideals 
of Christianity, we have said almost nothing 
of certain matters which formed the staple of 
Christian preaching a generation ago. 

I 

Perhaps the greatest theologian America 
has produced, a saint, and one of the great 
preachers of the world, was Jonathan 
Edwards. His most famous sermon was en- 
titled, "Sinners in the Hands of an angry 
God." In it he described men as suspended 
by a thread over the bottomless pit of eternal 
woe. 

The note struck by Jonathan Edwards has 
formed so characteristic a part of Christian 
teaching that to many people Christianity 
means nothing else than the attempt to 

140 



THE CHRISTIAN HOPE 141 

frighten men into virtue by fear of hell fire. 
When Kipling desires to contrast the teaching 
of the gentle Buddha, and to urge upon Chris- 
tians a broader charity toward their heathen 
brothers, he addresses them as 

"Ye who tread the Narrow Way, 
By Tophet-flare to Judgment Day." 

Forty years ago one seldom heard a ser- 
mon, and certainly never an evangelistic 
appeal, which did not rest its case mainly 
upon the sinner's impending doom. 

To many earnest and thoughtful people 
the loss of this sense of the exceeding sinful- 
ness of sin and the awfulness of God's wrath 
against it accounts for the spiritual flabbi- 
ness of modern life and the failure of the 
church to make any impression upon the 
world. 

There can be no doubt, as we have already 
seen, that Christianity regards life as involving 
a genuine moral risk, or that it regards sin as 
involving utter spiritual disaster and death. It 
is doubtless true that the thought of our day is 



142 WHAT IS A CHRISTIAN 

extremely superficial at this point, and that 
the world is impatient of the stern warning 
which religion utters. 

The changed emphasis in religious teaching, 
however, is not merely a weak concession to 
the spirit of the time. It is due in large 
part to factors in modern thought which are 
in reality the product of Christianity itself. 

Chief of these is the recognition of the 
spiritual possibilities of human nature. Men 
have come to see that it is possible to trans- 
form bad men into good. Their attitude 
toward the criminal is no longer that of 
vengeance, but rather of desire for his reforma- 
tion. Our penal institutions are becoming 
reformatories, and there is a growing convic- 
tion that in the heart of the worst man lie 
buried possibilities of goodness which need 
only to be quickened into life and given an 
opportunity for development to change the 
whole character of the man. 

On the surface this attitude seems to involve 
a denial of one of the teachings of orthodoxy 
which has long been regarded as a corner- 



THE CHRISTIAN HOPE 143 

stone of religious truth ; namely, the depravity 
of human nature by reason of which the heart 
of man is inclined to evil and that continually, 
— on which account he deserves damna- 
tion and can be saved only by being born 
again and receiving a new nature in place 
of that which he inherited from our first 
father. 

This doctrine in its traditional form was 
the product of devotion to the literal inter- 
pretation of the scriptures, and has largely 
given place in modern theology to a recog- 
nition of the weakness and imperfection of 
undeveloped humanity, by reason of which 
it is like a little child and needs the for- 
bearance and wise guidance of parental love. 
The child may still be wilful and rebellious, 
and so cut himself off from the family life 
and from his Father's help. The change 
of attitude involved in his self-surrender 
to his Father brings about such a transforma- 
tion in his spirit and life as may justly be 
called a new birth. 

The new theology insists no less earnestly 



144 WHAT IS A CHRISTIAN 

than the old on the necessity for this changed 
attitude, and upon the grave peril of moral 
degeneration and death which is involved 
in the persistent attitude of wilful self- 
assertion. But the new theology takes the 
parable of the Prodigal Son rather than the 
Epistle to the Romans as the basis for its 
psychology of religion. 

It is not always realized that the old the- 
ology made provision for quite as broad an 
interpretation of sin and regeneration through 
its doctrine of "prevenient grace." The 
sinner at all times was subject to such opera- 
tion of the divine Spirit in his soul as made 
it possible for him at any time, by simply 
changing his attitude toward God, to come 
immediately into the relation of sonship 
and receive the regenerating influence of 
divine grace. 

Translated into untechnical language, this 
meant that although there was in reality 
nothing good in ordinary human nature, the 
divine power was continually at work even 
in the hearts of bad men, supplying those 



THE CHRISTIAN HOPE 145 

rudimentary impulses toward good which, 
if given free play, had power to transform 
the bad man into a good one. 

Modern thought simply does away with 
the theological machinery which was the 
tribute paid to the literal interpretation of 
the New Testament, and says there are in 
the heart of the worst man good impulses 
which, if stimulated and developed, are capa- 
ble of transforming him into a good man. 
All we have lost is a considerable amount of 
obscure theological reasoning, and we have 
gained a more frank and simple approach to 
the human soul. 

This change in the theory of spiritual 
dynamics, coupled with a growing recognition 
of the reformatory rather than vengeful pur- 
pose of punitive measures, have largely dis- 
placed the appeal to the motive of fear in 
Christian preaching. Men have come to 
feel that there is not much moral value in 
refraining from sin simply for fear of punish- 
ment. 

All that was really of value in the old way 



146 WHAT IS A CHRISTIAN 

of getting at things is preserved in the recog- 
nition that every act has its unescapable 
consequences, and that the evil and selfish 
impulses of human nature will lead to sure 
personal and social disaster if indulged. 

II 

The other principal element in the Christian 
preaching with which most of us were familiar 
in our childhood was the glowing and vivid 
description of Paradise. This also has been a 
favorite point of attack for the critics of the 
faith, who regard religion as an attempt to 
bribe men into virtue by promises of reward. 

No doubt this motive has often been crudely 
employed in Christian preaching, and the 
world has happily outgrown it. We have 
come to see that there is little moral value 
in obedience which must be purchased by a 

gift. 

It may be worth while, however, to stop 
just for a moment to note that there is a 
broad sense in which the hope of reward 
plays a large and legitimate part in all human 



THE CHRISTIAN HOPE 147 

life. From the scholarships and medals and 
honorary degrees which are the prizes of 
scholarly attainment, to the vast profits 
which reward enterprise and foresight in the 
commercial realm, men pay universal tribute 
to this motive in their ordinary activities. 

The kind of prizes which appeal most to 
men may differ widely in individual cases. 
As character is developed and the spiritual 
insight becomes more profound, the character 
of the desired reward becomes higher and 
purer. Doubtless, the true saint is he whose 
virtue is its own reward ; that is to say, who 
finds in the consciousness of spiritual victory, 
and the approval of right-thinking souls, 
the enduring satisfaction which repays him 
for all of the sacrifices involved in the spiritual 
struggle. 

But to deny the power of this motive to 
sustain men in the conflict, and to inspire 
them to look beyond the present moment 
to the future achievement, is simply to lose 
oneself in words and to refuse to face real 
life. 



148 WHAT IS A CHRISTIAN 

The real meaning of the promise of heaven 
which has played so large a part in Christian 
thought and life is the enthronement of hope 
in human experience; the assurance that in 
God's good time every human problem will 
be solved and every normal desire of human 
nature find its ultimate satisfaction. 

Christianity is the religion of hope. It 
looks out upon a world which is confessedly 
imperfect and fragmentary, and refuses to 
believe it a finished world, done with and set 
aside. 

It refuses equally to believe it an accidental 
world, a by-product of processes and forces 
which no one can understand and of which 
we know nothing. 

It finds rather in the very imperfection of 
the world the promise of hope. It looks 
upon creation as a process. It anticipated 
by nineteen centuries the doctrine of evolu- 
tion which declares all existence to be a 
progress toward some far-off end. It sees in 
every springtime the promise of harvest, in 
every seed the promise of growth, in every 



THE CHRISTIAN HOPE 149 

flower the promise of fruit. It knows that 
childhood is imperfect, but sees the promise 
of childhood fulfilled in manhood. 

So when it finds humanity imperfect, it 
dares to look forward to the dawn of a new 
day when the lessons of life shall have been 
learned, when the individual shall have at- 
tained to the full spiritual stature of the 
sons of God, and human society become 
the heavenly kingdom. 

Ill 

In the early church the Christian hope 
took the form of the anticipation of the 
speedy return of Christ to set up in person 
his kingdom in the earth. 

Certain of Christ's own sayings seemed 
to promise such return, at least in the form 
in which they have come down to us. It is 
impossible to be certain whether Jesus him- 
self said these things in this form, or whether 
by reason of the crude Messianic hopes 
which his disciples shared with the rest of 
the Jewish people they misapprehended what 



150 WHAT IS A CHRISTIAN 

he did say and reported him imperfectly; 
but there is no doubt that the New Testa- 
ment writers shared the belief of their breth- 
ren that the generation then alive would 
witness the return of Christ and the setting 
up of his miraculous heavenly kingdom on 
earth. 

There is equally no doubt that they were 
mistaken. The generation of the apostles 
fell on sleep and were gathered to their 
fathers. Nineteen centuries have passed 
away and history goes on in its accustomed 
way. 

Nevertheless, the hope of the literal re- 
turn of Christ to set up a miraculous kingdom 
on the earth has persisted. Men have com- 
forted themselves with remembering that a 
thousand years are with the Lord as one 
day, and that the mistake of the early dis- 
ciples as to the time does not of necessity 
vitiate the hope of his coming. 

We have no desire to enter into the con- 
troversy over the return of Christ, but there 
are two or three things which must be said. 



THE CHRISTIAN HOPE 151 

The first is that those interpreters of 
prophecy who find in the books of Daniel, 
Ezekiel and Revelations indications that these 
are the last times, or who regard the war 
in Europe as Armageddon, have had their 
predecessors in every age. The Beast has 
been Nero, Mohammed, Caesar Borgia and 
Napoleon; the Scarlet Woman has been 
Islam, the Roman Church and Mrs. Eddy, 
The utter lack of any general agreement 
among the advocates of this point of view 
as to the interpretation of the prophecies 
renders the sober thinker somewhat skeptical 
regarding the whole religious conception in- 
volved. 

If we will remember the principle which 
we have elsewhere found so fruitful in inter- 
preting the sayings of Jesus, namely that he 
meant not what he said, but what he meant, 
we may discover that it is not necessary to 
take him literally in this connection. 

He said, This generation shall not pass 
away until these promises be fulfilled. He 
said, There are some standing here who shall 



152 WHAT IS A CHRISTIAN 

not taste death until they shall see the king- 
dom of God come with power. 

If we ignore the literal implication of these 
words and content ourselves with their spirit, 
we shall see that they were amply fulfilled 
in their own time and have received repeated 
and larger fulfilment throughout Christian 
history. 

The little group of frightened disciples 
who fled from the mob in Gethsemane, or 
warmed themselves tremblingly at the fire 
in the outer court of the high priest's palace 
while their Master met his trial within, were 
utterly crushed by his crucifixion. Their 
hopes were destroyed, and they said sadly 
one to another, "We trusted that it had 
been he who should have redeemed Israel/' 

But something happened in Joseph's garden 
which turned their despair to wonder and 
hope and radiant joy. John and Peter found 
the tomb empty. Mary looked into the 
face of One whom she supposed to be the 
gardener, heard him say, Mary, and clasped 
his feet with the rapturous cry, Rabboni. 



THE CHRISTIAN HOPE 153 

Doubting Thomas looked upon a form he 
thought never to see again, and put his 
finger into the print of the nails and his 
hand into the thrust of the spear, and won- 
deringly cried, My Lord and my God. 

Waiving the debate as to the physical 
reality of these apparitions, or even the 
authenticity of the stories themselves, some- 
thing happened to these men and women 
which turned them from a scattered group 
of crushed and disappointed mourners into 
a radiant band of death-defying enthusiasts 
who lived henceforth in the glad conviction 
that the kingdom of God was come with 
power. 

Once more the little group gathered in an 
upper room in Jerusalem for prayer and 
praise, and to talk over the wonderful events 
of the past few weeks. They were still 
blind and ignorant as to the larger meaning 
of their Master's teaching. They had no 
conception of his spiritual power. But while 
they waited there came suddenly upon them 
a baptism of spiritual inspiration. 



154 WHAT IS A CHRISTIAN 

Again we waive the question as to the 
nature of this experience. Something hap- 
pened on the day of Pentecost in Jerusalem 
to that little band of Jewish peasants which 
made them a flaming fire and sent them 
forth to light the torch of spiritual enthusiasm 
throughout the Roman Empire. In less than 
twenty years men were saying in remote 
Greek cities, "They that turn the world 
upside down have come hither also." Within 
a generation Roman Emperors were consulting 
what to do to check the new movement. In 
less than three hundred years the gibbet 
on which a Jewish peasant met a malefac- 
tor's death became the proud standard of the 
Roman Empire, and the armies of the world 
marched under it with the slogan, "In This 
Sign, Conquer." Was not this a fulfilment 
of the promise of Jesus? 

One other event of striking significance to 
the Jewish mind must be taken into account. 

Remember that the Jew regarded himself 
as chosen of God; he believed implicitly in 
the miraculous history of the Old Testament. 



THE CHRISTIAN HOPE 155 

He looked confidently for the day when Jeru- 
salem should be the capital of the earth and 
the king of the House of David should give 
the law to the Roman Empire. 

Is it any wonder that even to Jewish Chris- 
tians the destruction of Jerusalem was the 
end of the world? It at least marked the 
end of a mighty epoch in the spiritual his- 
tory of mankind. To us who look back upon 
it from the viewpoint of modern civilization, it 
was at worst nothing more significant than the 
destruction of Louvain. Nineveh and Bab- 
ylon have disappeared. Alexandria was de- 
stroyed by the Caliph Omar. The fall of 
Jerusalem to us is only one of many similar 
catastrophes in human history. But to the 
devout Jew, even the Jewish Christian, it 
was a cataclysm even more overwhelming 
than it would be to a modern Englishman if 
the German army should lay England waste, 
and London on heaps, a smoking ruin, and 
of Westminster Abbey should leave not one 
stone upon another. 

We do not insist that those commentators 



156 WHAT IS A CHRISTIAN 

are right who see in the destruction of Jeru- 
salem the literal fulfilment of all the Apoc- 
alyptic prophecies of the Old and New Testa- 
ments; but to a vivid historical imagination 
it seems amply sufficient to meet the thought 
in the mind of Jesus when he foretold the 
destruction of the temple and the tribulation 
that was to come upon all flesh. 

At all events, the most earnest believer in 
the impending advent of Christ would not 
insist that this doctrine is a part of essential 
Christianity, or deny the name Christian to 
one who finds in the recurring outbursts of 
spiritual power in human history the essen- 
tial fulfilment of the Christian hope. 

IV 

The expectation of a Messianic Kingdom 
to be inaugurated by the spectacular return 
of Christ has been transformed in the Chris- 
tian consciousness of our day into the hope 
of Christianizing the social order. 

It is easy to see that such a hope would 
have been meaningless to the apostolic age. 



THE CHRISTIAN HOPE 157 

The early church was recruited largely from 
the lower orders of society. To dream of 
exerting an influence upon the whole political 
structure of mankind so great as to transform 
its fundamental political theory and recon- 
struct the entire social and economic fabric 
was beyond the power of the human imagina- 
tion in its wildest flights. The most which 
could be hoped for was to rescue as many as 
possible out of a doomed world, and to await 
the judgment of God to overthrow the an- 
cient order of things and to create a new 
heaven and a new earth wherein dwelleth 
righteousness. 

It is otherwise with us who stand upon the 
pinnacle of nineteen centuries of historical 
development. We have seen the old order 
reconstructed not once or twice. 

The Roman Empire which in the first 
century seemed as stable as the everlasting 
hills long since crumbled into dust. The 
ecclesiastical empire which was set up on 
its ruins to maintain the outlines of a social 
order amid the chaos of the barbarian inva- 



158 WHAT IS A CHRISTIAN 

sion has likewise long since disappeared. 
The institutions of feudalism which suc- 
ceeded in turn gave place to the autocratic 
empires of France and Spain; and now at 
last we behold the whole world under the 
sway of democracy. 

But when we look at this development we 
see that democracy itself is one of the fruits 
of Christianity; that it was implicit in the 
teaching of Jesus and Paul and that it is the 
leaven of the Christian evaluation of human 
nature which has been working throughout 
all the centuries to bring about this result. 

In their dismay over the terrible catastro- 
phe that has befallen the world men are 
telling us that Christianity has broken down 
and that the boasted progress of civilization 
is an illusion. 

Yet this very war bears eloquent witness 
to the immeasurable influence which Chris- 
tianity has exerted upon human ideals, when 
we consider the strenuous efforts made by 
all parties to the conflict to justify themselves 



THE CHRISTIAN HOPE 159 

at the bar of the world's conscience. The 
very dismay which has fallen upon humanity, 
the feeling that this war is somehow a dis- 
grace to mankind, the protest of all the peoples 
that it was forced upon them, and that they 
are fighting in self-defense against the un- 
warranted aggressions of their neighbors, tells 
of a new motive and a new spirit in human 
life. 

A hundred years ago war was still an honor- 
able profession and no nation would have 
dreamed of apologizing for being engaged in 
it. Not only has the world progressed by 
attempting to mitigate the severities of war, 
so that captives are no longer sold into slav- 
ery and the women and children of the con- 
quered put to the edge of the sword; but 
war itself has become a horrible thing, a 
crime against humanity. Nothing could bear 
such powerful witness to the hold of the 
Prince of Peace upon the heart of the modern 
world. 

The economic and social progress of man- 
kind has been not less remarkable. 



160 WHAT IS A CHRISTIAN 

The majority of the inhabitants of the 
Roman Empire were slaves. Our writers 
on industrial problems indulge in much lurid 
rhetoric over wage-slavery and the condition 
of the poor; but one has only to read the 
economic history of even a few centuries ago 
to realize how vast has been the progress of 
social justice. 

The recognition of the profound influence 
already exerted by Christianity upon human 
society has enlarged the Christian hope ; and 
prophets to-day are dreaming, not of the re- 
turn of Christ to destroy the world and set 
up a new and miraculous heavenly kingdom. 
They are dreaming of a world of righteous- 
ness and peace, of brotherhood, of mutual 
service; of a world where poverty shall be 
abolished, where every child shall be born into 
a heritage of physical comfort and intellectual 
opportunity; a world in which the ancient 
abuses of the social order shall have been done 
away and the whole level of humanity lifted 
to the plane of the Kingdom of God. 

No doubt, this dream seems to many but 



THE CHRISTIAN HOPE 161 

an idle tale. We do not expect its advent 
to-day or to-morrow. But we, too, may com- 
fort our hearts with the reflection that one 
day is with the Lord as a thousand years. A 
mushroom will spring up in a night. If you 
are fortunate some October morning, you may 
see one push its way through the dead leaves 
and spring before your eyes to its full growth. 
But you cannot, by watching, trace the devel- 
opment of an acorn into an oak tree. 

A baboon and a Hottentot baby may be 
born the same day in an African jungle, but 
the ape will be full-grown and the grandfather 
of a generation of apes before the baby has 
grown to maturity. We need not wonder 
that the Almighty takes many centuries for 
the development of humanity if He took a 
thousand ages to fit the earth for the habita- 
tion of man. 

Christianity faces the future with an un- 
conquerable faith, believing that every up- 
ward step in the history of mankind hitherto 
is the promise of that far-off divine event to 
which the whole creation moves. 



162 WHAT IS A CHRISTIAN 

V 

Yet even this does not exhaust the Chris- 
tian hope, for Christianity insists on inter- 
preting life not only in terms of the whole 
race as an organic unit, growing through 
the centuries and learning its lessons until 
it shall attain ultimately the full stature of 
maturity, but equally in terms of the individ- 
ual. It insists that every man is a child of 
the Infinite, and it refuses to measure his 
life and destiny by months and years. 

This is the meaning of those visions of 
Paradise which cheered the hearts of our 
fathers. The hope of heaven is not a reward 
to bribe men into virtue; it is simply the 
declaration that their individual personal 
lives are not meaningless or fruitless; but 
that every longing and aspiration of the 
human soul is a promise of ultimate fruition, 
a draft upon the boundless resources of Al- 
mighty God. 

The shortness of human life is, after all, 
the supreme tragedy of mankind. We start 



THE CHRISTIAN HOPE 163 

out in youth with such lofty ideals, only to 
sink into the sad disillusionment of the 
middle years as we realize how far short we 
have fallen. We send forth our hearts in 
friendship and love, only to discover that 
chance and change are busy ever; that with 
the best will in the world our friendships are 
marred by human selfishness, are interrupted 
by the shifting scenes of our pilgrimage; 
that even the deepest and sweetest human 
affections do not fulfil their promise to our 
hearts; and death drops its curtain over all, 
sending us down the afternoon slope of life 
lonely and bereaved. 

"The boast of heraldry, the pomp of power, 

And all that beauty, all that wealth e'er gave, 
Awaits alike th' inevitable hour : 

The paths of glory lead but to the grave." 

An immeasurable sadness has fallen upon 
the world in these last days through the 
eclipse of the immortal hope. Under the 
spell of the scientific method men have re- 
fused to believe anything which could not 
be demonstrated, and the contemplation of 



164 WHAT IS A CHRISTIAN 

that bourne whence no traveler returns has 
chilled and darkened their minds. 

But Christianity refuses to be browbeaten 
by the tyranny of the material world. Basing 
its faith on its experience of the love of God, 
on the spiritual power of Jesus Christ — which 
certainly was not confined within the tomb in 
Joseph's garden, whatever men may think of 
his physical resurrection — Christianity faces 
the future with inextinguishable hope and 

joy. 

The Christian belief in immortality does 
not rest on the evidence collected by the 
Society for Psychic Research, but on the 
veracity of God, on the trustworthiness of 
spiritual instincts, on the conviction that the 
Universe is not bankrupt. 

Men no longer paint glowing pictures of 
heaven. Streets of gold and gates of pearl 
have become mere figures of speech. A 
harp and crown no longer figure in the hopes 
of saints. Nevertheless the Christian belief 
is as simple and direct to-day as it has ever 
been. It simply dares to believe that the 



THE CHRISTIAN HOPE 165 

loftiest ideals and purest aspirations of men 
will be fulfilled, and that the love upon 
which death lays so rude a hand will blossom 
into a fairer and deeper joy when the day 
breaks and the shadows flee away. 

"There shall never be one lost good ! What was, shall 
live as before ; 
The evil is null, is naught, is silence implying sound ; 
What was good, shall be good, with, for evil, so much 
good more ; 
On the earth the broken arcs ; in the heaven, a perfect 
round. 

All we have willed or hoped or dreamed of good, shall 
exist ; 
Not its semblance, but itself ; no beauty, nor good, 
nor power 
Whose voice has gone forth, but each survives for the 
melodist 
When eternity affirms the conception of an hour. 
The high that proved too high, the heroic for earth too 
hard, 
The passion that left the ground to lose itself in the 
sky, 
Are music sent up to God by the lover and the bard ; 
Enough that he heard it once: we shall hear it 
by-and-by." 

— Browning, " Abt Vogler." 



VII 

THE CHRISTIAN CHURCH 

We have summed up the main outlines of 
Christianity ; its fundamental convictions, 
its ethical demands, its individual and social 
ideals. It remains to ask, what is the rela- 
tion of the Church to all this ? 

Are we to say with some that the church 
has been the chief obstacle to the spread of 
essential Christianity; that it has from the 
beginning failed to understand its Lord, and 
that the nineteen centuries of ecclesiasticism 
have been utterly abortive? Or are we on 
the other hand to identify Christianity and 
the church, and to regard the indifference or 
hostility which the present age displays to- 
ward the church as the chief sign of its spirit- 
ual decay? 

That the present time is marked by an 
attitude of indifference rising in some quarters 

166 



THE CHRISTIAN CHURCH 167 

to bitter hostility toward organized Chris- 
tianity there can be no doubt. It not in- 
frequently happens that in gatherings of 
working men the name of the church is hissed 
while the name of Jesus Christ is met with 
cheers. Socialism in the main is bitterly 
hostile to the church. The labor movement 
is largely indifferent. Labor unions hold 
their meetings on Sunday, and it is the general 
testimony not only of labor leaders but of the 
leaders of the church itself that those who 
work with their hands are seldom found with- 
in its doors. 

Conditions in Europe have during the last 
quarter of a century been much worse than 
in America. The Catholic Church has been 
bitterly hated in Italy and almost driven out 
of France. In Germany the great mass of 
the population has been estranged from the 
church. But even in this country statistics 
reveal a pitifully limited growth in proportion 
to the amount of time and money expended. 
Church statistics are notoriously inaccurate, 
but they err if at all mainly on the side of 



168 WHAT IS A CHRISTIAN 

optimism ; yet even so they indicate that the 
growth of the church has not kept pace with 
that of the population. The gain in church 
membership for 1914 in the United States 
was something more than three quarters 
of a million, or about two per cent; while 
the population increases something more than 
three per cent each year. 

Two or three years ago 1600 churches in 
the state of Illinois were reported as having 
closed their doors in a single year. The prob- 
lem of the rural community and of the small 
town rivals that of the city, where down- 
town churches by the thousand have been 
sold and turned into motion picture houses 
or garages while the church followed its more 
prosperous members uptown. 

Mission boards in all denominations appeal 
ever more earnestly for support, yet most of 
them have during the past few years been 
compelled to face large deficits or cut down 
their work. 

The total seating capacity of the churches 
in an average city would probably not accom- 



THE CHRISTIAN CHURCH 169 

modate a fourth of the population, yet not 
one church in twenty is filled to its capacity 
excepting on Easter Sunday or Christmas. 
The Sunday evening service has become the 
bugbear of ministers and an ever-increasing 
problem for the average church. 

The motion picture show, the Sunday 
theatre and ball game, the automobile and 
the Sunday paper have been blamed for this 
state of affairs, but the condition itself is 
all but universally admitted. 

There is a widespread feeling that this 
condition is due not so much to religious in- 
difference as to the failure of the church to 
meet the spiritual needs of the time. 

A brilliant professor in a leading Univer- 
sity, in reply to a questionnaire regarding the 
attitude of University men to the church, 
replied, "A lover of religion will avoid all 
the churches, liberal and orthodox, as a 
lover of wine would avoid empty bottles." 
Perhaps this particular professor was more 
interested in making an epigram than in 
stating the exact truth, but there can be no 



170 WHAT IS A CHRISTIAN 

doubt that many essentially religious men 
both among the educated and the working 
classes are estranged from the church. 

It is undoubtedly true that we must dis- 
tinguish between Christianity and churchian- 
ity, and realize that the failure of the church 
to hold its own under the conditions of pres- 
ent-day life is not necessarily the failure of 
the Christian faith. But while this is true, 
the insistent demands of the historical church 
for recognition as the official custodian of 
spiritual truth no less than the equally em- 
phatic insistence of her critics that she be 
cast out as a failure makes it necessary for 
us to consider earnestly the question of the 
real place of the church in human life, and 
her function in the religious training and 
development of mankind. 

With our main contention hitherto I fancy 
the great majority of Christian teachers in 
all the churches would find themselves in 
substantial agreement. Doubtless many of 
them would place the emphasis in a different 
place at one point or another, Some may 



THE CHRISTIAN CHURCH 171 

feel that we have treated the authority 
of the New Testament somewhat cavalierly. 
Possibly many would regard the treatment 
of other important matters, such as the 
New Birth or Eternal Punishment, as hardly 
adequate. 

But in the main the discussion thus far 
has dealt with the great fundamental con- 
victions and ideals in which all Christendom, 
ancient and modern, agrees. If a few things 
which by some are regarded as essential have 
been set aside or inadequately stressed, it 
will doubtless be admitted that the matters 
herein set forth constitute the main factors 
of essential Christianity; and that any man 
whose life displays the influence of these 
ideals and convictions is entitled to be re- 
garded as Christian. 

When we come to speak of the church, 
however, the case is otherwise. There are 
two main conceptions of the place and func- 
tion of the church in the spiritual history of 
mankind, and they are so essentially con- 
tradictory that it is impossible to find a 



172 WHAT IS A CHRISTIAN 

common denominator for them. One or the 
other must be definitely set aside. 

In accordance, therefore, with the author's 
own deepest convictions he has chosen that 
view of the church which seems to him most 
clearly justified both in logic and experience. 
That in so doing he must part company with 
a very large part of the Christian world with 
whose principal beliefs and spiritual aims he 
finds himself otherwise in entire harmony 
is a matter of profound regret. 

But if we are to find a complete and satis- 
factory answer to the question, What is a 
Christian? we must face the problem of the 
Christian organism. One can only be loyal 
to one's own convictions and set forth that 
interpretation of organized Christianity which 
seems to him to appeal most widely to the 
common sense of mankind and to be destined 
to fill the largest place in the social and 
spiritual history of the future. 

Rudyard Kipling once wrote, 

"If England was what England seems, 
And not the England of our dreams ; 



THE CHRISTIAN CHURCH 173 

But only putty, brass and paint, 

How quick we'd chuck 'er, but she aint I " 

Every patriot realizes the force of the lines. 

No nation measures up to the ideals of its 
citizens. America seems to the casual ob- 
server to be made up of cheap politics, of 
superficial statesmanship, of graft and chi- 
cane, of incompetence and selfishness in public 
office, of greed and materialism in private life ; 
yet this is not the America we love. 

For the America of our dreams is the land 
of the free and the home of the brave. It 
stands for equal opportunity, for universal 
justice, for democracy, the government of 
the people, by the people and for the people. 
It is for the sake of these ideals which find 
such fragmentary and imperfect realization 
in our actual political history that we love 
the flag and stand ready to sacrifice our all 
for our country's good. 

The same spirit ought in reality to be ap- 
plied to the Christian church. If the church 
were what the church seems, and not the 
vision of our dreams; but only ecclesiastical 



174 WHAT IS A CHRISTIAN 

politics and millinery, and bigotry, and empty 
pharisaism, 

" How quick we'd chuck 'er, but she aint ! " 

For the church is nothing after all but the 
attempt of the Christian ideal to embody it- 
self in institutional form for the sake of 
perpetuating itself in the world, of implant- 
ing its ideals in the human heart, and stamp- 
ing its impress upon human history. 

That such an embodiment of a spiritual 
purpose should be a growing organism, for- 
ever imperfect and forever under the neces- 
sity of readjusting itself to the growing life 
of mankind, ought to be taken for granted. 

To charge the mistakes and failures of the 
mediaeval church to the account of Chris- 
tianity is as unjust as to charge the existing 
chaos in the political conditions of Mexico 
to the account of democracy. 

The nature of the church has been often 
misunderstood by its leaders themselves. 
Claims have been made in its behalf which 
cannot be justified at the bar of history. Mis- 



THE CHRISTIAN CHURCH 175 

takes and failures have marked her career 
from the beginning even until now, and doubt- 
less will continue till the end of time. 

But when all is said the church remains in 
essence and ideal the body which the spirit 
of Christ is forever fashioning for itself in 
the life of the world. It is the pillar and 
stay of the truth, the fulness of Him that 
filleth all in all. 

I 

It is necessary to look for a moment at 
certain claims which have been made in 
behalf of the Church which seem to have 
been set aside by the experience of man- 
kind. 

The first is the claim to wield absolute 
authority. 

The mediaeval church claimed both in- 
tellectual and spiritual authority. It alone 
had power to declare religious truth, and to 
doubt its creed or dispute its interpretations 
of truth was a mortal sin. It claimed equally 
the right to declare the ultimate standards of 



176 WHAT IS A CHRISTIAN 

right and wrong, to punish the guilty, to 
grant indulgences, to forgive the penitent. 
To the Church had been committed the keys 
of heaven and hell; whatsoever she bound 
was bound in heaven, whatsoever she loosed 
was loosed in heaven. 

This claim was apparently founded on the 
words of Jesus. But, as we have seen, these 
words are to be interpreted not by the gram- 
mar and the dictionary but by life itself; 
and the claim of the church must be justified 
at the bar of experience if it is to stand. 

There can be no doubt that if spiritual 
life rests upon exact information, either as to 
theological truth or as to ethical demand, 
some final authority is necessary to declare 
that truth. President Patton of Princeton 
has defined Christianity as a piece of super- 
natural information, and declared this infor- 
mation to be contained in the Scriptures. 

But inasmuch as there are some two or 
three hundred Christian sects each claiming 
to have the correct interpretation of the Scrip- 
tures, it is evident that nobody knows ex- 



THE CHRISTIAN CHURCH 177 

actly what that piece of supernatural infor- 
mation is, and there must be some court of 
final appeal. 

The attempt of Protestantism to rest its 
case upon the authority of an infallible 
Bible has broken down completely, and there 
is no stopping place short of an infallible 
church ; with power to declare not only what 
was true nineteen hundred years ago, but 
equally what that truth means in relation to 
the new conditions of the present time. 

But the infallibility of the church equally 
breaks down, if for no other reason, because 
an infallibility which has to justify itself to the 
fallible reason of the individual before it can 
get its decrees accepted is practically useless. 

As a matter of fact, as we have seen, Chris- 
tianity is not a piece of supernatural infor- 
mation at all. It is a spiritual ideal which 
carries with it a spiritual interpretation of life 
and reality and which commends itself to the 
spiritual intuitions of humanity and stands or 
falls by its power to satisfy the needs of the 
human soul. 



178 WHAT IS A CHRISTIAN 

Such a faith has no need of an external 
authority. No infallibility whether of Pope 
or Bible can be of the slightest service to it, 
and the attempt to find such infallibility in 
church or book has been one of the most 
serious obstacles to the progress of the truth. 

The notion of an infallible and authorita- 
tive church dies hard, but it has been def- 
initely set aside by the experience of the 
last thousand years; and the future lies 
with that growing and flexible organization 
of spiritual impulses and ideals which shall 
most fully and freely represent the spirit of 
Jesus Christ. 

The second is the sacerdotal interpretation 
of the church, its claim to be the sole deposi- 
tory of spiritual power and grace. 

According to this point of view the 
sacraments of the church are not merely 
the outward and visible signs of an inward 
and spiritual grace, but they are efficacious; 
that is to say, the performance of the rite 
at the hands of the authorized official of 



THE CHRISTIAN CHURCH 179 

the church is fraught with miraculous spiritual 
power. 

In this case everything depends upon the 
legitimacy of the priesthood who exercise 
this power. It was committed at the begin- 
ning by Jesus to his apostles, and can only 
be possessed by those upon whom the hands 
of the apostolic succession have been laid. 

This is the High Church ecclesiastical doc- 
trine. Like the infallibility of the church 
it claims to rest upon the words of Jesus. 

But the principles which we have found to 
be necessary for the understanding of his 
teaching throw doubt upon the doctrine at 
the outset, and the experience of history 
tends to confirm this doubt. If this view 
were correct, we should have a right to expect 
those communions which claim the apostolic 
succession to have a monopoly of spiritual 
power, a thing which the advocates of sacerdo- 
talism in their wildest moments have not 
dared to assert. So far is this from being 
true that the greatest spiritual advance in 
Christian history has often been made 



180 WHAT IS A CHRISTIAN 

through those whom the sacerdotal party 
has refused to recognize as Christian at all. 
Add to this the fact that sober history can 
find no trace of the apostolic succession, and 
the doctrine becomes one more of the never- 
ending succession of misapprehensions which 
have clogged the spiritual development of 

mankind. 

II 

Setting aside these excessive claims to 
authority and spiritual power which have 
wrought so much harm in religious history, 
and interpreting the church in the broadest 
sense as organized or institutional Chris- 
tianity, we must further recognize the serious 
weaknesses and mistakes which have hindered 
its true mission. 

The first is the tendency which the Chris- 
tian church shares with every organization 
to become an end in itself rather than the 
means to a larger end. 

Secular history bears abundant witness to 
this tendency. Political parties which were 
born in the enthusiasm of a great social 



THE CHRISTIAN CHURCH 181 

movement are forever degenerating into po- 
litical machines, having no aim greater than 
to perpetuate their power and to distrib- 
ute the spoils of office among their loyal 
henchmen. 

It is not to be wondered at that this fate 
not only overtook the Catholic Church in 
the Middle Ages, and necessitated the Refor- 
mation in order to set free the spiritual life 
which was being dwarfed and cramped under 
the incrustations of ecclesiastical power; but 
that the Protestant churches which were born 
of the spiritual enthusiasm of the Reforma- 
tion, or of great revival movements such as 
puritanism and the Wesleyan Revival, have 
fallen under the same condemnation. 

Too often the ministers of the church have 
become mere ecclesiastics, contenting them- 
selves with running the machinery of the 
church and building up its influence and 
power in the world, forgetful of the larger 
social and spiritual ends which were com- 
mitted to its charge. 

This peril is enhanced when the church 



182 WHAT IS A CHRISTIAN 

becomes too closely linked to the political 
life of the state, until it becomes merely an- 
other department of the political machinery. 
But even in free America the church has 
not been free from this fault. 

The second failure of the church is its 
tendency to conservatism. 

The more vital and important any truth in 
the life of men, the slower they are to change 
their method of interpretation. Religion is 
concerned with matters affecting the very 
destiny of the soul. It is not to be wondered 
at, therefore, that in matters of religious 
opinion men should be more conservative 
than at any other point in their intellectual 
life. 

This is not an unmixed evil. It has often 
served as a steadying force in the life of the 
world; and always it has this beneficent 
result, that it compels men to think their 
thought through, and to make sure that in 
their enthusiasm for new ways of thinking 
and in their endeavor to interpret new ex- 
periences and deeper knowledge they shall 



THE CHRISTIAN CHURCH 183 

not lose sight of the largest and most signifi- 
cant bearings of their thought upon the ethi- 
cal and spiritual life of the race. 

But when this healthy conservatism of 
humanity in matters pertaining to the spirit- 
ual life becomes a narrow and hide-bound 
bigotry, then the new wine of the spirit must 
burst the old bottles of dogma and creed. 

The enormous advance in knowledge which 
has been afforded by the science of the last 
hundred years, and the new ethical and 
social problems which have resulted from in- 
dustrial progress, have made necessary the 
re-statement of the whole body of Christian 
truth in the terms of present-day thought 
and life; and the time has come when the 
natural conservatism of the church must be 
cast aside in the spirit of an earnest and 
reverent eagerness to discover the larger 
meanings of the Christian message. 

If the church fails to meet this situation, 
and endeavors to restrain the growing power 
of progressive thought, the increased pres- 
sure thus brought about is likely to result 



184 WHAT IS A CHRISTIAN 

in an explosion which might be disastrous to 
the ancient machine. 

Once more, there can be no doubt that the 
church has failed to adjust itself to the new 
conditions of life which have resulted from 
the industrial and social revolution of the 
past century, and that in many ways it no 
longer ministers to the real needs of humanity. 

In its reaction from the shallow worldli- 
ness of the seventeenth and eighteenth cen- 
turies evangelical Christianity has tended 
to become narrowly pietistic; and to act as 
though men had no interests other than the 
spiritual and no duty in life except to prepare 
for death. 

As a result it has left out of account all the 
varied and complex social needs of the world. 
It has ignored the world of culture. Its 
attitude toward amusements has been chiefly 
negative; and it has not infrequently laid 
the ban of its severe displeasure upon those 
who have endeavored to interpret its ethical 
teachings in the interest of social regenera- 
tion. The minister who interested himself 



THE CHRISTIAN CHURCH 185 

in the housing conditions of his people, or 
attacked the most glaring abuses of the in- 
dustrial order, has been told to leave these 
things to the secular authorities and preach 
the simple gospel. 

No thoughtful man can observe the signs 
of the times without realizing that the church 
must mend her ways at this point or be cast 
as rubbish to the void. 

The spiritual interests of mankind are 
paramount, but they are intimately wrapped 
up with the normal interests of his daily life. 
Christianity is for the whole man or it is 
nothing at all. It must not only make him 
ready for heaven but it must bring a heaven 
upon earth. 

It is the task of Christianity to-day not only 
to re-translate its spiritual message in terms 
which the common man can understand ; but 
to attack the abuses of the social order; to 
proclaim in no uncertain fashion the ethical 
demands of Jesus in terms not of the thirteenth 
century nor of the eighteenth but of the twen- 
tieth; to elevate and purify the daily life of 



186 WHAT IS A CHRISTIAN 

the world in all its manifold and complex in- 
terests, not only industrial and commercial 
but educational. 

It must even direct its attention to the 
social life, and foster such normal and whole- 
some opportunities for recreation and pleas- 
ure as shall minister to the largest well-being 
of mankind. 

The church must enlarge her conception to 
make room for this work. She must adjust 
her machinery, or reconstruct it if need be, 
until it is fitted to minister to the actual 
needs of living men and women. Merely 
to condemn the modern world because it is 
too interested and absorbed in its own life 
to hear her call is futile. Her Master's 
method was to mingle with all men, to seek 
out human need wherever it was to be found ; 
and he bade his church go out into the high- 
ways and hedges and bring the needy to his 
feast. 

The final weakness of the church is to be 
found in the failings of church members. 

It is useless to ignore the fact that the world 



THE CHRISTIAN CHURCH 187 

insists on judging the church member by a 
higher standard than that which it applies 
to the man in the street. This may be unfair ; 
but it is human, and it cannot be escaped. 
If church members indulge in shady business 
transactions, in uncharitable and malicious 
gossip; if they fail to adapt their business 
methods to the demands of the social ideal; 
if they lower their daily life to the standards 
of the world about them, and fail to impress 
mankind with the grace and sweetness of 
their Master's spirit ; the world sees and takes 
note, and the church must bear the burden 
of their unworthy lives. 

Due allowance should be made for the fact 
that the man in the street sometimes hides 
himself behind the weaknesses of church 
members, and to that end often accuses them 
unjustly. But when all is said we must not 
fail to recognize the responsibility that rests 
upon the individual member of the church 
to bring his life into harmony with the ideals 
he professes, lest he stand convicted of a 
practical unfaith which not only imperils his 



188 WHAT IS A CHRISTIAN 

own moral character but becomes an almost 

insuperable obstacle in the path of the cause 

he represents. 

Ill 

But after every concession has been made 
to the critics of organized Christianity, it 
remains true that the world owes an immeas- 
urable debt to the Christian Church as the 
custodian of its loftiest ethical ideals and the 
minister of spiritual progress. In spite of 
the fact that the church has frequently mis- 
apprehended her own nature and mission; 
that she has shared the limitations and failings 
of all human institutions; that her history 
has been marred by much that was out of 
harmony with her own ideals and so has 
weakened her influence and paralyzed her 
own most earnest efforts, the church remains 
the one institution in human life which has 
stood for God and righteousness, which has 
borne witness to the worth and dignity of 
human nature and the immeasurable signif- 
icance of human destiny; the one organiza- 
tion which has its root in the purpose to 



THE CHRISTIAN CHURCH 189 

serve mankind, and whose influence in the 
main has been to inspire and uplift the 
human race. 

In spite of the narrowness and bigotry of 
mediaeval theology; in spite of the abuses 
of ecclesiasticism ; in spite of the Crusades 
and the Inquisition, of worldly popes and 
unworthy priests, of paganism in worship and 
laxity in morals, the Christian church was 
sole custodian of spiritual light and life 
throughout the Middle Ages, and handed 
down the torch to the modern world. 

And to-day, in spite of all her weakness and 
limitation, in spite of the sectarianism which 
divides her forces, in spite of the narrowness 
and bigotry of ecclesiastics and the timidity 
of religious leaders, in spite of theological 
conservatism and lack of aggressive leadership, 
of the mistakes of preachers and the weakness 
of church members, the church remains the 
one institution in the civilization of the world 
whose supreme aim it is to establish the 
Kingdom of God and to lift mankind out of 
its moral darkness and social degradation 



190 WHAT IS A CHRISTIAN 

into the light and joy of spiritual power and 
moral victory. 

This world is so constituted that every 
human ideal necessarily seeks to embody 
itself in institutional form. It is impossible 
for great truths to hang suspended in the air 
or merely to exercise a vague and general 
influence upon public opinion. 

Political truth creates political parties; 
intellectual truth founds schools and estab- 
lishes professorships ; economic truth organizes 
itself into industries and commercial bodies; 
social truth is forever forming institutions 
such as charity organization societies and 
peace conferences, in order that its ideals may 
have a local habitation and a name and may 
be brought to bear directly upon the organized 
life of the world. 

To suppose that the great creative spiritual 
ideals of Christianity could be content to 
float in the air and to exert only a general 
influence upon civilization is to fail to appre- 
hend the essential genius of humanity. As a 
shellfish secretes his shell from his own flesh 



THE CHRISTIAN CHURCH 191 

and the waters with which he is surrounded, 
so truth is forever secreting an organized 
body out of the world of men ; and the body 
which Christian truth thus creates for itself 
is the Christian church. 

It is the task of Christianity to teach men 
its lofty and inspiring conceptions of philo- 
sophical truth. It must train them in the 
practice of Christian virtues and the pursuit 
of its moral ideals. 

Especially does it desire to implant these 
things in the hearts and lives of youth. If 
political democracy finds it desirable to es- 
tablish public schools, to inculcate reverence 
for the flag and inspire patriotic devotion 
by national holidays and the teaching of 
national history, is it to be wondered at that 
Christianity seeks to gather the youth of the 
world into its institutional life in order that 
the plastic mind of childhood should be in- 
formed and directed by the loftiest ideals 
the heart of man has conceived ? 

It is the task of Christianity also to bear its 
message of hope to all who have fallen under 



192 WHAT IS A CHRISTIAN 

the power of moral evil; who through igno- 
rance or wilfulness have become the victims 
of their own lower nature and whose lives 
are degraded and distorted thereby. 

Christianity is a message of hope to all the 
derelicts which strew the banks of the stream 
of life. The evangel of moral regeneration 
and victory is to be proclaimed wherever 
human hearts are human, wherever there is 
sin and moral weakness and spiritual hunger. 
This work will not perform itself, but needs 
the backing and guidance of institutional life. 

Added to this is the task of holding before 
the world the inspiring vision of the Christian 
ideal, of comforting men in their sorrow by the 
vision of the immortal hope, of keeping alight 
the fires of social enthusiasm and spiritual 
consecration on the altars of the world. 

Surely no greater task was ever laid upon 
human hearts than this. Small wonder that 
men have forever fallen short of its demand, 
that their mistakes and failures have weakened 
their power and distorted their vision; so 
that from age to age the spirit of the Christian 



THE CHRISTIAN CHURCH 193 

faith has been compelled forever to seek new 
channels of expression, and one reformation 
after another has broken the crust of institu- 
tional conservatism and burst forth in a new 
flood of spiritual power beyond the limits 
which had been set by human ignorance and 
mistake. 

Small wonder that in spite of everything 
the lofty vision of a church without spot or 
wrinkle, the bride of Christ, the body of which 
he is the head, the fulness of his divine life 
and power, should have held the imaginations 
of earnest men in all ages and should have 
power still to inspire them with the largest 
devotion and the most eager self-sacrifice. 

When all is said the Christian church, like 
the England or the America of our dreams, is 
not the historic organization we have known ; 
but the loftier and purer ideal of which the 
historic institution is the imperfect but forever 
growing embodiment. 

The Christian church is not the Catholic 
nor the Lutheran nor the English church; 
not the Presbyterian, nor the Congregational- 



194 WHAT IS A CHRISTIAN 

ist, nor the Methodist, It is all of these, 
and it is more than all; for it is the ever- 
growing vision of the Christian ideal ; forever 
purifying itself ; forever becoming more deeply 
understood ; forever challenging mankind to a 
deeper consecration to the service of its eternal 
purpose ; and forever embodying itself in the 
institutional life of the world under forms 
which vary from age to age, which are con- 
fessedly imperfect and subject to all the limita- 
tions of the flesh, but which none the less are 
worthy of the deepest reverence and most 
earnest devotion of the lover of his kind, 
because when all is said they are attempts to 
express the loftiest visions and the worthiest 
ambitions of which humanity is capable. 

In The Servant in the House, Manson, 
the butler, is a new incarnation of the Son of 
Man. He comes to bring to his brother, the 
clergyman, a new vision of the Christian hope, 
and to help him rebuild his church, which has 
fallen into disrepair. The crypt of the old 
church is so full of dead men's bones that the 



THE CHRISTIAN CHURCH 195 

life of the whole community has been poisoned, 
and men have ceased to find in the church 
the fountain of inspiration and life. Before 
the larger work can be accomplished it is 
necessary for the minister to call in his other 
brother, the drain -man, and get rid of all the 
dead foulness which is stifling and poisoning 
the life of the people. But it is also necessary 
to catch a vision of the real church which the 
Bishop of Humanity is undertaking to con- 
struct in the world. Of this true church, 
which has never yet been realized in human ex- 
perience, but which is the dream and purpose of 
every lover of the Christian ideal, Manson says : 

"I am afraid you may not consider it an 
altogether substantial concern. It has to be 
seen in a certain way, under certain conditions. 
Some people never see it at all. You must 
understand, this is no dead pile of stones and 
unmeaning timber. It is a living thing. 

"When you enter it you hear a sound — a 
sound as of some mighty poem chanted. 
Listen long enough, and you will learn that 
it is made up of the beating of human hearts, 
of the nameless music of men's souls — that 
is, if you have ears. If you have eyes, you 



196 WHAT IS A CHRISTIAN 

will presently see the church itself — a loom- 
ing mystery of many shapes and shadows, 
leaping sheer from floor to dome. The work 
of no ordinary builder ! 

" The pillars of it go up like the brawny 
trunks of heroes; the sweet human flesh of 
men and women is molded about its bulwarks 
strong, impregnable : the terrible spans and 
arches of it are the joined hands of comrades ; 
and up in the heights and spaces there are 
inscribed the numberless musings of all the 
dreamers of the world. It is yet building — 
building and built upon. Sometimes the 
work goes forward in deep darkness : some- 
times in blinding light : now beneath the 
burden of unutterable anguish: now to the 
tune of a great laughter and heroic shoutings 
like the cry of thunder. Sometimes, in the 
silence of the night-time, one may hear the 
tiny hammerings of the comrades at work up 
in the dome — the comrades that have climbed 
ahead/ 5 

To this church every man belongs who is 
moved in any measure by the Christian spirit, 
who founds his life in any degree upon the 
Christian philosophy, who strives however 
feebly toward the Christian ideal, whether 
or not his name be found on the church 
register. 



THE CHRISTIAN CHURCH 197 

That he ought also in virtue of this rela- 
tion to the Church Invisible to join himself in 
practical devotion and service to some branch 
of the Christian organization is only a counsel 
of common sense. 

In the present crisis in Europe, we of 
America, secure in our distance from the 
struggle, may indulge our sympathies with 
one side or the other according to our prej- 
udices; but the loyal citizen of Germany or 
France has no such discretion. He must go to 
the front or prove traitor to the deepest 
obligations of his manhood. And when he 
goes to the front he must go not as a free 
lance, a guerrilla, obeying his own impulses 
and disregarding the plans of commander in 
chief; but he must enter the ranks of the 
organized army and become part of the 
machine. 

The parable needs no exposition. If Chris- 
tianity be in any sense true, if its ideals have 
any right to challenge the loyalty of humanity, 
then there can be no neutrals in the spiritual 
warfare of mankind. We may not compre- 



198 WHAT IS A CHRISTIAN 

hend the program of the Commander in Chief. 
We may not in all respects approve the tactics 
of the General Staff. We may criticize the 
field equipment, we may recognize the blun- 
ders of captains and corporals. But we have 
no right to refuse to enlist. 

With all her limitations and mistakes the 
Christian Church is still the Army of Jesus 
Christ, on the firing line of the world's spiritual 
battle; and she claims the loyalty and devo- 
tion of every soldier of righteousness, until 
her armor of "gray, war-dinted steer 5 is 
exchanged for the robe and palm of victory, 
and the imperfections and weakness of the 
Church Militant have become the radiant 
perfection of the Church Triumphant which is 
without fault before the Throne of God. 



INDEX 



Agassiz, Louis, 98. 
Apostolic Age, 

Communism in, xv, 93, 94. 
Interpretation of Christianity, 
xiv, xv. 

B 

Baptist, Definition of a, xiii. 
Bernhardi, General von, 64, 74. 
Browning, Robert, 
Quotations from, vii, xix, 20, 
47, 165. 

C 

Carnegie, Andrew, 107. 
Catholic Church, 
Asceticism, 31, 123. 
Distinction between "pre- 
cepts" and "counsels of per- 
fection," xx, 27, 32. 
In France and Italy, 167. 
In the Middle Ages, xviii. 
Cellini, Benvenuto, xix. 
Christian as Reformer, The, 123, 

124. 
Christian Doctrines, 
Atonement, 14, 15. 
Future Punishment, 18-20, 140 

-146. 
Immortality, 17, 18, 162-165. 
Incarnation, 11-14. 
Love, 47, 61, 103, 122, 127. 



New Birth, The, 41, 42, 143- 

146. 
Return of Christ, 149-156. 
Total Depravity, 142. 
Christianity and the Social Order, 
103, 109, 111-113, 134-139, 
156-162, 184, 185. 
Christianity as Experience, 115- 

122. 
Christians, Typical, 129-134. 
Church, The, 

Apostolic Succession, 178-180. 
Authority of, 175-177. 
Greatness of, 188-198. 
Mistakes of, 180-188. 
Modern Conditions, 167. 

E 

Edwards, Jonathan, 140. 
Everybody's Magazine, 

Popular discussion in, ix. 
Evolution, Doctrine of, ix, 6, 9. 



Francis of Assisi, Saint, 90, 95, 
129. 

G 

Gilder, Richard Watson, 

Quotation from, 16. 
Goldsmith, Oliver, 

Quotation from, 51. 



200 



INDEX 



Gray, Thomas, 
Quotation from, 163. 

H 

Hale, Edward Everett, 
Exclusion of, from Church 
Council, xix. 
Harnack, Professor A., 56. 



Ingersoll, Robert, 3. 

J 

Jesus, 

and Poverty, 91-94, 98-101. 
Authority of, 11-17, 43-44. 
Doctrine of Non-resistance, 39, 

58, 61-63. 
Paradoxes of, 35-39. 
Principles of, 44-53. 
Second Coming of, 149-156. 



Kant, Immanuel, 

Essay on Perpetual Peace, 76- 
85. 
Kingdom of God, The, 91. 
Kipling, Rudyard, 

Quotations from, 83, 141, 172. 



Lowell, J. R., 
Quotation from, 18. 

M 

Mair, or Major, John, Scottish 
Scholastic Philosopher, 51. 



k 

Nicea, Council of, 

Homo- or homoi-ousion, xvii. 
Noyes, Alfred, 

Quotation from, 86. 



Oppenheimer, Franz, 88, 102. 
Origen of Alexandria, 95. 



Peace, 

Heroism of, 85-87. 

Kant on "Perpetual," 76-85. 

R 

Rockefeller, John D., 90, 107. 
Rockefeller, John D., Jr., 105. 



Servant in the House, The, 195. 
Spencer, Herbert, 3, 9. 
State as an Organism, The, 64- 
67. 



Taylor, Father, 2. 
Tennyson, Alfred, 

Quotation from, 18. 
Tolstoi, 28, 34, 36, 55-57. 

U 

Union, American, 80. 

W 

War, 
Benefits from, 72-73. 



INDEX 



201 



In Europe, The, vii, xvi, 7, 72, 

76, 198. 
The Christian and, 70, 73. 
Wealth, 

Production of, 103-106, 108. 
The Christian and, 110. 
Use of, 106-110. 



Wendt, 32. 

Wesley, John, xii, 2, 98 

Wordsworth, William, 

Quotation from, 17. 
World Court, A, 

Lack of, 69. 

Need for, 79. 



Printed in the United States of America. 



T 



HE following pages contain advertisements of a 
few of the Macmillan books of kindred interest 



NEW EDITIONS OF DEAN HODGES'S BOOKS 

Christianity between Sundays $1.25 

The Heresy of Cain $1.25 

The Battles of Peace $1.25 

Human Nature of the Saints $1,25 
The Year of Grace (2 volumes) Each $1.25 

The Path of Life $1.25 

Cross and Passion $1.00 

In This Present World $1.25 

Faith and Social Service $1.25 

Uniformly bound, each 12mo 

Dean George Hodges is one of those gifted writers who makes of religion 
a very practical thing. He neither tires the reader with discussions of 
dogmas nor of creeds, but as a critic once put it, " gets down to business in 
a businesslike fashion." His books which have previously been published 
and are known to many men and women are reissued now in new editions 
bound uniformly in blue cloth. Individually and collectively they demon- 
strate once more the truth of the Christian Register's comment that " Dr. 
Hodges is an inspired apostle of the new philanthropy." The intimate 
talks in the volumes are on themes of vital interest to every one living in 
this twentieth century. They contain possibilities of application so pointed 
and evident that " they convey their own instruction and their own impulse," 
to quote further from the Christian Register's remarks on one of the author's 
works, which may in absolute truth be applied to them all. 



THE MACMILLAN COMPANY 

Publishers 64-66 Fifth Avenue New York 



By GEORGE HODGES 

Classbook of Old Testament History 

Dean of the Episcopal Theological School, Cambridge 

Cloth) I2tn0) $1.00 

This volume, with a simplicity of style that charms the reader, brings 
the results of the best scholarship of the day, without any reference to 
the processes, to the general reader. Old Testament History is not 
found in the Bible as a continuous narrative. The author gives two 
reasons why it is necessary for the Old Testament to be rewritten for 
the general reader. First, as it stands it is in two editions. "One 
edition includes the books from Genesis to Second Kings. The other 
edition includes the books from First Chronicles to Nehemiah." To 
get the entire history it is necessary to bring these two series of books 
together. The second reason is that there are books of poetry, and 
especially books of prophecy, in the Old Testament, which were 
written in the midst of the events the historians narrate, and al- 
though these books bring new light to the historical events, they 
are placed by themselves. Historical criticism has done an enormous 
amount of keen critical work in analyzing and constructing the mate- 
rials. The result is that to-day we can get a pretty good idea of the 
actual history of the Hebrews. This book gives this history for the 
general reader. 

The table of dates at the close of the book will be found to be most 
useful. Beginning two thousand years before Christ the great dates 
are given down to the conquest of Syria and Palestine by Alexander 
the Great in 332 B.C. The book will be most useful to the general 
reader, and for classroom work. 



Everyman's Religion 

J Cloth, i2mo 9 $i.jo 

Macmillan Standard Library Edition, 50 cents 

Underlying the many sects of the Christian religion there are certain 
fundamental facts which are sometimes lost sight of in the devotion to 
a particular creed. The purpose of Dean Hodges's book is to present 
these essential elements of Christian faith and life in a manner simple, 
unconventional and appealing to a man's common sense. The con- 
clusions at which the author arrives are largely orthodox, but the 
reasoning makes no use of the argument from authority. 



THE MACMILLAN COMPANY 

Publishers 64-66 Fifth Avenue New York 



The Episcopal Church : 

Its Faith and Order 
By GEORGE HODGES 

Cloth, i2mo, $ 1.25 

This volume is a concise statement of the doctrine and discipline of 
the Episcopal Church. 

It is intended for three groups — the younger clergymen who will find 
in the analyses prefaced to the chapters material that will be valuable in 
their own teaching, members of confirmation classes who will be helped by 
the summaries which it contains, and persons who are desirous of knowing 
the doctrine and discipline of the Episcopal Church. The volume em- 
bodies the results of twenty years' experience in the instruction of students 
in the Episcopal Theological School. In the midst of many natural 
differences of emphasis and opinion there are indicated in this work those 
positions in which most members of the Episcopal Church are substantially 
agreed. 

CONTENTS 

PAGE 

I. The Bible 3 

II. The Prayer Book 21 

III. Baptism 41 

IV. Confirmation 59 

V. Renunciation yj 

VI. Obedience 95 

VII. The Creed . 117 

VIII. The Church 141 

IX. Prayer 165 

X. The Holy Communion 183 



THE MACMILLAN COMPANY 

Publishers 64-66 Fifth Avenue New York 



Henry Codman Potter 

Seventh Bishop of New York 

By GEORGE HODGES 

Illustrated. Cloth, 8vo, $j.jo 

It will be a source of gratification to Bishop 
Potter's many friends to learn that the prepara- 
tion of the official biography of Dr. Potter has 
been entrusted to Dean Hodges of the Episco- 
pal Theological School. Long conversant with 
the large essentials of Dr. Potter's life, his train- 
ing and sympathy have been such as to qualify 
him to do the task well. The biography that 
he has written describes Dr. Potter's career 
throughout his ministry, especially as rector of 
Grace Church and as bishop of New York. 
The great public services of Bishop Potter are 
also dealt with at length. 



THE MACMILLAN COMPANY 

Publishers 64-66 Fifth Avenue New York 



BOOKS BY PROFESSOR RUDOLF EUCKEN 

Winner of the Nobel Prize for Literature in igo8 

Life's Basis and Life's Ideal 

The Fundamentals of a New Philosophy of Life 

By RUDOLF EUCKEN, Professor of Philosophy in the University 

of Jena. Translated with introductory note by ALBAN G. WlD- 

GERY, formerly Scholar of St. Catharine's College, and Burney 

Student, Cambridge, and Member of the University of Jena. 

Cloth, 8vo, $2.00 

Professor Eucken discusses the leading principles of his philosophy and 
its application to the different spheres of life. By careful analysis or extant 
conceptions of life the author shows their inadequacy, the necessity for a new 
conception, and the direction in which this must be sought. The author 
feels that he has a message for the present time, and one that is vital to the 
true interests of all. His voice is that of a prophet in the sense of an ethical 
teacher, rather than that of a philosopher in the more technical sense. 

The Meaning and Value of Life 

Translated by 
LUCY JUDGE GIBSON and W. R. BOYCE GIBSON, M.A. 

Cloth, i2tno, $1.2$ 

" There are scores of passages throughout the volume one would like to 
quote — the thinking of a man of clearest vision and loftiest outlook on the 
fabric of life as men are fashioning it to-day. It is a volume for Church- 
men and politicians of all shades and parties, for the student and for the 
man of business, for the work-shop as well — a volume for everyone who is 
seriously interested in the great business of life." 

Can We Still Be Christians ? 

Translated by LUCY JUDGE GIBSON. 

Cloth, i2mo, $1.25 

As might be expected from his numerous writings, some of which are well 
known in this country, Dr. Eucken 's answer to this question is emphatically 
in the affirmative. We not only can, but must still be Christians. The in- 
terest of this volume lies in the freshness with which the author sets forth 
his own personal view — in contrast with those current in the various 
churches claiming to be " orthodox"— as to what constitutes the veritable 
essence of that Christianity which alone can appeal to the modern mind. 



THE MACMILLAN COMPANY 

Publishers 64-66 Fifth Avenue New York 




Deacidified using the Bookkeeper process. 
Neutralizing agent: Magnesium Oxide 
Treatment Date: April 2005 

PreservationTechnologies 

A WORLD LEADER IN PAPER PRESERVATION 

1 1 1 Thomson Park Drive 
Cranberry Township, PA 16066 
(724)779-2111 



6^ 



Seal 



LIBRARY OF CONGRESS 




013 371 488 1 



S85cSooo 
§§8883b8 





